It's been four years since Wiesbaden declared a climate emergency, and with the outbreak of the war in Ukraine and the halt to Russian gas supplies, the question of how the city can reach its target of climate neutrality by 2035 - ten years before the date set by the federal government - has become even more pressing. wants to achieve.

Even if there are some doubts about the feasibility of the ambitious municipal goal, the four-party alliance in the town hall and the new environmental and economic department head Christiane Hinninger (Die Grünen) are determined to get as close as possible to it.

Oliver Bock

Correspondent for the Rhein-Main-Zeitung for the Rheingau-Taunus district and for Wiesbaden.

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It is undisputed that fossil natural gas has no future.

The 930 kilometer long natural gas network that Eswe operates and that brings heat into the homes of many of the 290,000 citizens is to be largely shut down by 2045.

In any case, the heating plan, the contours of which were presented to the environmental committee of the city councillors, envisages dividing the city into three energy zones: In a good 20 years, the periphery and the rurally structured eastern suburbs will be heated almost exclusively with electricity and heat pumps.

By then, an extensive district heating network will have been set up in the inner city, for which the city will presumably issue a compulsory connection.

The landowners will then have no choice but to purchase district heating, at least once the existing heating systems have expired.

Between the suburbs and the city center lies the hybrid zone, which will use both electricity and green hydrogen.

"Huge feat"

The director of Eswe supply, Jörg Höhler, calls the heat transition a "project of unprecedented magnitude" and a "tremendous feat".

In the city center this can only be achieved with district heating.

For this alone, investments in the double-digit millions per year are necessary for Eswe Supply alone.

Höhler called it necessary to deal with geothermal energy again in the periphery.

Open-space solar systems, as planned by municipalities around Wiesbaden, no longer seem to be out of the question, but Klaus Friedrich from the environmental agency sees conflicts with many landscape protection areas around Wiesbaden.

But more electricity needs to be generated from renewable sources, and the city needs to invest in storage technology.

On the subject of wind energy, Hinninger hopes that the pending judgment of the Hessian Administrative Court will clear the way for the Taunuskamm wind farm with ten wind turbines and, after replanning, more powerful rotors than previously requested can be used there.

According to analyzes by the Environment Agency, it is quite remarkable to what extent the city could minimize the emission of greenhouse gases in order to come closer to climate neutrality.

According to this, an annual reduction in electricity consumption of private households by 28 percent seems possible, and that despite taking population growth into account.

In the case of heating energy, a reduction of around 40 percent from 1500 gigawatt hours to less than 900 gigawatt hours is even possible.

However, the environmental agency assumes a refurbishment rate for residential buildings of 1.5 percent by 2030 and two percent in the following years.

Comparable savings are also possible in business and industry, even if these are much more difficult to estimate because of rapid change and technical advances, because of possible increases in efficiency and unknown growth rates.

Lead the city by example

To do this, she examined every single property of the “city group” and divided all buildings into efficiency classes in order to be able to prioritize renovation.

However, Friedrich admits that criteria other than climate protection can also be decisive in the ranking of school renovations, for example.

The school board is responsible for that.

If Wiesbaden does not achieve the climate goals it has set itself, it cannot demand the same from its citizens, said Friedrich.

The attitude of the citizens concerned many members of the parliamentary groups in the committee.

Martin Kraft (Die Grünen) advocated preparing citizens now for what is to come in the next two decades.

Nicole Röck-Knüttel (CDU) worried that homeowners might be overwhelmed when it came to energy consumption in private households.

The chairman of the climate protection advisory board, Martin Lommel, spoke of the willingness of the citizens that would soon be necessary to endure the forthcoming changes.

It is up to the city councilors to spend more money, for example to increase the municipal housing association's housing renovation rate to three percent a year.

The FDP missed a "price tag" on all plans in order to be able to estimate whether and how Wiesbaden can afford the desired energy and heating transition.

Hinninger left no doubt that this cross-sectional task would be a challenge: "It will be a Herculean task for which we must use all our leeway." projects could serve.

Without discussion, the committee made a decision in principle to build a biowaste fermentation plant in cooperation with the Rheingau-Taunus district.

After 2029, 35,000 tons of organic waste from the almost 500,000 inhabitants of both local authorities are to be recycled in the plant at Dyckerhoffbruch.