KOMpare – Making Municipal Heat Planning in Germany Transparent and Comparable

Municipal heat planning (MTP) is the cornerstone of a successful local heat transition, as the diversity of renewable heat sources and local building structures requires individual solutions adapted to each municipality. But how can the sum of individual solutions be compatible with achieving national climate targets in the various sectors in the long term? What interactions occur between local planning,  transport infrastructure planning and energy market developments? How can municipal heating plans be evaluated automatically in order to answer these questions in the first place? Scientists from the Öko-Institut, EWI and Fraunhofer ISE as well as employees from Trianel and digikoo look into these questions in the joint project KOMpare.

The “Bottom-Up Study on Decarbonizing the Heating Sector” for the National Hydrogen Council showed that applying national targets uniformly to all municipalities is not effective, as local conditions vary significantly. In addition, the KWP is being developed at different speeds and does not require direct implementation. However, it should increase planning and investment security for all parties involved. The large number of providers in the field of municipal heat planning, the differences in the quality of the available data, the human resources of the respective municipalities, and the freedom to define the target scenarios to be selected suggest that the results of the KWP may vary greatly. Initial individual comparisons of already published KWP have confirmed this hypothesis. It is also currently unknown to what extent neighbouring municipalities check for interactions between their KWP. This could be a relevant factor, particularly in the field of renewable energies and biomass, which could limit local potential to a greater extent. Furthermore, there is no guarantee that the sum of all heat plans will result in a coherent transition that is consistent with the strategies and targets of the federal government. Due to the relatively short time frame in which climate neutrality is to be achieved, delays and deviations caused by inconsistent planning could significantly hamper the achievement of targets.

This is where the KOMpare research project comes in. It systematically collects and automatically evaluates the heat supply plans that have been carried out so far and makes them available to the public in an evaluated form. The data is processed in such a way that it is easy to see the share of decentralized and centralized supply areas and technologies, the role of heating networks, and how they are supplied. In addition, the local results will be scaled up to the national level and compared with targeted transformation pathways in order to determine the extent to which municipal planning is consistent with or deviates from national strategies such as building, biomass, power plant, or hydrogen strategies. The data will be published in a transparency platform that will be institutionalized on the Energy Charts website. The data evaluated to date will be made available for non-commercial use.

The second focus of the research project is to investigate the effects of the published plans on energy markets. To this end, the results from the KWP will be fed into national system models to analyze the effects on energy markets including infrastructure, and then consequently the potential trickle-down effects on the realization of the local heating planning. Several energy system models developed by the project partners ISE and EWI are used for this purpose. For selected municipalities, the project then examines how their KWP deviates from integrated, model-based energy planning using the DISTRICT energy system model. The core result of a KWP under the Heat Planning Act is the division of the planned area into potential heat supply areas. To this end, various supply options are compared in terms of economic efficiency, implementation risk, security of supply, and cumulative greenhouse gas emissions. In most cases, this suitability assessment is limited to the planning area and does not take into account higher-level system effects. Therefore, the final step is to examine how the influence of the KWP on the energy markets in turn feeds back to the municipal level.