Esken again admitted mistakes. “We didn’t immediately understand how worried people were about the energy supply, even though it had long since been secured again,” said the SPD chairwoman of the “Welt am Sonntag”. When the traffic light government came into office, the gas storage facilities were empty. “We had to pull out all the stops to avert a supply crisis, but we succeeded.”
But “a lot of fear was stirred up” at the time, said Esken. “In this respect, the debate about the heating law fell into an uneasy mood.” The heating transition is urgently needed, one third of the CO2 emissions are caused by the buildings.
“It was always clear to us that we would design it in such a way that it was practical and financially affordable for citizens,” she said. “We should have started communicating with that. It went the other way around and that was a mistake.”
As a substantive omission, Esken said it was a mistake “not to think about municipal heat planning from the start”. It was also wrong “not to clearly name the support for investments and the protection of tenants from the beginning”. After the agreement in the traffic light coalition, there will now be a “socially fair and practical law” that will also advance important climate goals in the building sector.
The SPD chief negotiator for the heating law, Matthias Miersch, called the revision of the project a “good compromise”. The traffic light coalition is bringing together “climate protection and social balance,” said the SPD parliamentary group leader in the Düsseldorf “Rheinische Post” on Saturday. Miersch showed understanding that people were “unsure” of the long struggle over the heating law. At the same time, he emphasized: “It is not an alternative to do nothing.”
The SPD politician emphasized that new gas and oil heating systems should not receive any funding. The funding system will be adjusted so that only heating systems that are actually operated with 65 percent renewable energies are funded. In the case of heating systems that can be operated with hydrogen in the future, only the costs for converting to hydrogen operation should be eligible, explained Miersch.
The coalition had agreed on the specific wording for the heating law on Friday. This cleared a key hurdle for the parliamentary passage of the Building Energy Act (GEG) before the summer break.
The housing policy spokesman for the parliamentary group, Daniel Föst, called the agreement a “strength”. Now the solution is practicable. The draft law stipulates that a heater only has to be replaced when it is “completely gone,” said Föst on Deutschlandfunk. In addition, the state must first deliver with municipal heat planning and the expansion of the electricity grid.
The economist Veronika Grimm called the heating law too unambitious. It misses the climate goals, and it is also very complicated, she said in the interview of the week on Deutschlandfunk. The energy expert also warned of deadweight effects in the planned subsidy for the purchase of gas heaters, especially in the regulation for low-income households.
