As in other cities, most apartments in Hanover are heated with natural gas.

If you add the business operations, the natural gas share in the heat supply is currently around 83 percent, according to the municipal supplier Enercity.

The capital of Lower Saxony wants to drastically reduce this proportion.

Especially in the residential areas around the city center, where the proportion of gas heating is high, entire streets are to be converted to green district heating in a daring effort.

The heat would then come from power plants based on renewable energies and would be piped into the apartments.

Reinhard Bingener

Political correspondent for Lower Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Bremen based in Hanover.

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Hanover's Lord Mayor Belit Onay speaks of an important measure for climate protection, since more fossil fuels are used for heating in Germany than for generating electricity.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine made the project even more topical, because every natural gas burner removed reduces Germany's dependence on the Kremlin.

"If we succeed in urban energy transition in Hanover, it can become a role model for others in Germany," says Onay.

Lots of hurdles and uncertainties

The project in the city of 500,000 also shows how many political hurdles and economic uncertainties lie on the way to a municipal energy transition and that this requires intervention in the lives of many citizens.

Because the project, which costs more than 700 million euros, does not just mean a switch to green district heating.

At its core, it is about phasing out coal.

Some time ago, an initiative called "Hanover Renewable" launched a citizens' initiative.

The city politicians responded to this wish even before the population had voted.

With a large majority from the Left Party to the CDU, the council of the state capital voted last summer to bring the coal phase-out back four years to 2026.

This means that the large coal-fired power plant in the Stöcken district will soon have to be shut down: Unit 1 is scheduled to go offline in 2024, Unit 2 in 2026. The exit from coal is now also in the interest of the two major consumers in the neighborhood.

Both Volkswagen, which manufactures the "Bulli" in Stöcken, and the Hanover-based automotive supplier Continental are now interested in making their production climate-neutral.

The municipal utility had already sold another coal-fired power plant in Mehrum in 2017.

Enercity had started to phase out coal earlier than other municipal utilities,

What does all this mean for heating?

The associated dependency on Moscow will be at least somewhat reduced by the planned shutdown of the coal-fired power plant in Hanover-Stöcken.

Because the hard coal that is burned there has so far mainly come from Russia.

Enercity CEO Susanna Zapreva explains that the electricity produced in Stöcken is to be replaced primarily by wind turbines that her company is building throughout Germany.

So far it is the standard case of the energy transition.

It is more challenging to quickly organize a replacement for the heat from block 1 of the coal-fired power plant in Stöcke.

Zapreva relies on a mix of new sources, which - at least according to official standards - are considered renewable energies: The new waste incineration plant is already finished, a plant for incinerating sewage sludge is under construction, and there is one for a plant for incinerating waste wood approval.

A large heat pump and a biogas plant are to be added.