“Habeck’s heating plans continue to have the potential for social explosives”

The traffic light coalition in Berlin defused the heating plans of Federal Minister of Economics Robert Habeck (Greens) in their multi-day marathon meeting. At least that is the general reading. However, the 16-page paper does not say much about the heat transition, let alone anything concrete.

After all, there will be no ban on oil and gas heating after all. Conventional gas heaters should also be allowed to be operated with biomethane or green hydrogen in the future. How this works in practice was left open. The amendment to the relevant Building Energy Act (GEG) is to be passed by the Bundestag by the summer.

That means: keep up the pace.

The development on the German housing market is generally quite rapid – and not one that is relaxing.

FOCUS online: Mr. Bölting, how is living in Germany?

Torsten Bölting: Housing has become expensive in Germany and people are noticing that. In many regions it is now hardly possible or not possible at all to ensure affordable housing for everyone.

Why is that?

Bolting: The reasons are varied. These include taxes and the costs for the energetic refurbishment of existing buildings or better energetic standards in new buildings. But there are also other factors, such as the countless rules and regulations of recent years, which have made building and thus living more expensive.

Added to this are the increased material costs. And especially in the big cities, the enormously high property prices. All this leads to far too little being built. Scarce goods are more expensive.

And now the property owners are supposed to finance the heat transition.

Bolting: On the one hand, it is of course nonsense that we are still installing heating systems that run on fossil fuels. The problem, however, is this radical turnaround that is now to be completed. The decisions of the coalition committee have not changed that.

Until recently, gas heaters were encouraged and said it was the future, or at least a good transition. Now it is suddenly said that this should no longer work. After all, the traffic light has now agreed in the coalition committee that there should be support – we don’t know what that looks like yet.

In addition, the heat pumps are not available as an alternative in the quantities that are needed. Except that they are expensive. That’s what makes it so difficult for builders right now. In theory, the decarbonization plans are understandable, but in practice I don’t see how this is supposed to work. The coalition committee has not changed that.

The installers report a real run on oil and gas heating in the past few weeks.

Bolting: The problem with such ad hoc regulations is that they create a certain amount of panic. Understandably, such short-circuit reactions then occur. If swimming were banned from tomorrow, the pools would be full today. The amendment to the Building Energy Act (GEG) acts like an emergency brake. This is a problem and a manufacturing error. There is a lack of reliability here, which only leads to uncertainty.

What do yesterday’s traffic light decisions actually change compared to the previously known draft?

Bolting: In concrete terms, we still know far too little. You want to relieve households – which is good – but there are no statements as to how this should work. Are there any grants? Where are they from? How complicated will the application be? And what alternatives are there anyway?

The traffic light paper always speaks of households – almost a quarter of them apartments in Germany are in the hands of housing companies and cooperatives. There are also many households that cannot afford high additional costs. I assume that there will be solutions for this as well. That’s not clear yet.

Our editorial team receives many letters from property owners, especially retirees, who don’t know how to pay for the switch. Do you think this concern is justified?

Bolting: The concern is still justified because the prices for alternative heating concepts are very high and the corresponding models are not available in large numbers. In practice, this is how homeowners go to their installer and ask what they should do. He will answer: he doesn’t have a heat pump at the moment and it would cost three times as much as gas heating.

In addition, the electricity for the heat pump has to come from somewhere. And if none Photovoltaic is on the roof, then that is probably expensive electricity, half of which comes from fossil fuels. It’s an unfortunate situation. Here we as a society have slept through the energy transition.

At the same time, however, one does not know how oil and gas prices will develop and how the availability of oil and gas will be in the future. In the long term, therefore, the ecological heating variants will also make economic sense. In addition, fossil fuels result in high follow-up costs for society due to climate change, which we don’t even notice in our wallets at first, but we do encounter them.

Up to now, owning a home has been considered a secure retirement provision. You pay off the house for the rest of your working life so that you can be debt-free when you retire. But if suddenly tens of thousands of euros more could be due for a new heating system, is there a life model on the brink?

Bolting: This will hit some households, especially older households, hard. No question. A remedy must be found here and support offered, as the traffic light coalition has at least signaled. Overall, I don’t see this life model as such on the brink.

What needs to be done to keep it that way?

Bolting: To ensure that this remains the case, it would be important not to look too closely at the individual building, but rather at the context of the district. So especially in rural areas on village cohesion. How can a heat supply for a village be set up that everyone benefits from? This could be biomass, for example. The advantage is that not every household is faced with the one big problem of making huge investments immediately. You can communitize that, for example in cooperatives. That would be a good way to advance the heat and energy transition.

But if it actually happens in Germany like this, like Habeck, could it possibly even develop social explosive power?

Bolting: Habeck’s heating plans continue to have the potential for social explosives if it is not really possible to provide practical relief here. This is also due to the style with which such appointments are made. The citizens are first massively unsettled before they vaguely row back. This does not create trust in politics and is a danger to society. We are currently making a radical about-turn here, which is necessary in the matter of getting away from fossil fuels. But the problem lies in the social explosiveness of immediacy.

That means?

Bolting: Many households will be financially overwhelmed without support. In addition, property owners and builders feel fooled. People are unnecessarily upset against the fundamentally correct and widely accepted goal of stopping climate change. Many now say: It’s not worth it to me. Why do I now have to bear these burdens that could have been stretched over decades? In Germany, the energy and heat transition was overslept for decades.

What is the consequence?

Bolting: The potential for protest is increasing. The milieus that are dissatisfied are increasing. This challenges us as a society because we cannot just leave these groups behind. Society has realized that climate change is a problem. The impacts are getting closer. We see them, for example in the Ahr valley.

In addition to the federal government’s heating plans, the EU is now coming around the corner with a compulsion to renovate.

Bolting: I don’t see that these plans will actually come to fruition. This poses enormous problems even for solvent private individuals and companies. Above all, they ultimately meant that buildings would have to be shut down if they could not be renovated in time. At that point, at the latest, there will be a great outcry, since that would mean, for example, that the tenants would also be thrown out on the street. However, there are currently no alternative housing options for them. The new building is known to be stuck.

How can the heat transition succeed in a socially acceptable way?

Bolting: We have to rely much more on pragmatic and district-related approaches by leaving the building level, testing different approaches and being flexible with terms and concepts. Hard cuts are difficult. In addition, I think it is much more important to take the owners, the people it affects, than to put the technology in the foreground. It is important to inform them, to advise them and, above all, to present viable concepts. This is hard work.

Is affordable housing still utopian?

Bolting: It would be important to curb the frenzy of regulation. The procedures need to be simplified. Real estate must become cheaper, for example through municipal real estate funds or concept awards. Above all, we have to say goodbye to the idea of ​​being able to solve the housing shortage there, especially in large cities. That will no longer be possible. That’s why we have to concentrate on other residential locations and make them more attractive, small towns for example.