Call for funding „Vom Plan zur Wende“
The Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action (BMWK) has published a call for funding ‘Vom Plan zur Wende’ (english: From Plan to Transition) for the Heat Transition 2045 mission and the Energy System 2045 mission.
Applied energy research is helping to create a climate-neutral heating sector. Many technical solutions are already available today. However, these are not yet sufficient for the heating transition to succeed. Municipal heat planning (CHP) can be an important process in driving forward the heat transition at municipal level. However, in order to maximise the potential of this mandatory task at municipal level and accelerate implementation, planners must consider interfaces and interactions with other sectors. It is also important that planning does not remain at a strategic level, but that it ultimately leads to a concrete implementation process. Both integral planning and the continuation of implementation require appropriate formats and tools.
The need for research funding in the field of municipal heating planning is explicitly addressed in the BMWK's funding announcement of 25 April 2024 for the 8th Energy Research Programme. It is of central importance in order to meet the challenges of climate change and ensure a sustainable, efficient local heating transition.
The aim of the ‘Vom Plan zur Wende’ funding call is therefore to accelerate the systemic implementation of municipal heating plans by enabling municipal actors to quickly and economically put new solutions into practice and thus contribute to achieving climate targets.
This requires more testing, gathering more experience and transferring it to other locations. Furthermore, close co-operation between practice and science is necessary. Increased cooperation means that the state of knowledge is available to municipal players more quickly, while at the same time practical requirements can be incorporated more quickly into the implementation of the municipal heating transition. Broad-based funding or support for mandatory measures is excluded.
This call for funding consistently builds on central topics of the funding announcement for the 8th Energy Research Programme in chapters 2.3.2 (districts) and 2.4.1 (energy system analysis, cross-sectoral system modelling and planning). It substantiates research questions and approaches in the following three modules:
- Module 1 districts: Preparation of implementation projects at district level in the context of the municipal heating transition. In cooperation with other local stakeholders and research institutions, municipalities are to be enabled to test current solution approaches and research results from the mandatory instrument of municipal heat planning for direct practical implementation at a location. The transfer to other locations is also the subject of the projects.
- Module 2 Energy system analysis: Generation of orientation knowledge for heat planning on the basis of (modelled) solution approaches that depict a sensible and sustainable embedding of the CHP in the superordinate energy supply infrastructure.
- Module 3 Synthesis: Comprehensive monitoring and cross-evaluation of the subsidised projects with input from the subsidised (municipal) stakeholders.
For the first time, the BMWK's energy research funding offers municipalities in particular low-threshold access to funding in the energy research programme with the micro-project format in order to leverage their potential to accelerate the heating transition.
The mere creation of a municipal heating plan is not the subject of this call for funding. Project proposals submitted must clearly state the extent to which the planned work goes beyond the mandatory tasks defined at federal or state level and which overarching research questions are addressed.