In the dispute over the heating law, an owners’ association – unlike the chancellor – does not want a decision before the summer break. According to an expert opinion, the law is partly unconstitutional.
The planned building energy law is once again causing a stir. “The traffic light coalition must not push Economics Minister Habeck’s planned heating law through Parliament before the summer break,” said the head of the Haus und Grund owners’ association, Kai Warnecke, according to a statement on Friday. The discussion of the past few weeks has shown that the project can still be steered in a reasonable direction, according to Warnecke.
Meanwhile, Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) expects a quick solution. Government spokesman Steffen Hebestreit said in Berlin on Friday that he could “detect an unchanged confidence in the Federal Chancellor that things will take their course in the coming week.” When asked whether this meant that the so-called heating law would then also come into the Bundestag, he answered “yes”.
Sharp criticism of the law also comes from Bavaria. According to an expert opinion, the heating law is partially unconstitutional. It violates the principle of equality in Article 3 of the Basic Law in several points, said the Bavarian Minister of Economics Hubert Aiwanger (free voters), who had commissioned the legal report. The best example is the age limit of 80 years for exemption from the obligation to replace the heating system, Aiwanger said on Friday: Owners under 80 years of age are treated completely arbitrarily differently than older ones.
Reform of municipal heat planning
With the Building Energy Act, the federal government wants to herald the departure from oil and gas heating systems as early as next year. According to the draft law, from 2024 every newly installed heating system should be operated with 65 percent renewable energy.
In addition to a reform of the building energy law, the traffic light coalition is also planning a reform of municipal heat planning. According to the draft law, states and municipalities should present concrete plans in the coming years on how they want to convert their heating infrastructure to be climate-neutral. This is intended to give citizens an important orientation by letting them know whether their house will soon be connected to a district or local heating network or whether they should convert their heating to a heat pump in the foreseeable future.
It is “not unreasonable to talk about an obligation for households to connect to an existing heating network,” said Ingbert Liebing, general manager of the Association of Municipal Enterprises (VKU), the “Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung, NOZ” (Friday). Compared to individual solutions such as heat pumps or gas boilers, heating networks have the advantage that “all connected buildings benefit in one go” when switching to renewable energy sources and homeowners are free of their heating worries.
Source: Stern
