How to finance Europe’s heating and cooling transition – this is the question addressed by our latest study, conducted for us by LCP Delta. As we see financing as one of the key bottlenecks for the heating and cooling transition, we hope these results will contribute to a better understanding of the financing gap for the residential heating and cooling transition.
Currently, ¾ of Europeans heat their homes with fossil fuels. While there is a growing, renewable part, only 6% of heating and cooling fuel consists of truly decarbonized solutions because the major renewable energy part in heating is biomass.
The uptake of forms of energy consumption such as heat pumps, geothermal or solar thermal – be they large scale for district or individual systems – is a measure of the modernisation of our economy, tackling air pollution and securing Europe’s energy independence. The heating and cooling sector is also responsible for a significant part of the EU’s greenhouse gas emissions, roughly a quarter of the emissions when we are talking about residential uses. So without decarbonizing the sector, we can also not achieve the EU’s climate targets.
So there’s a lot at stake in the clean heat transition, and that is why we wanted to tackle this question of financing.
The study explores the question of how much money is needed to make all households in the EU switch to clean DH, HPs, solar thermal in the next 25 years?
We then look in more detail at seven member states, representing a large share of Europe’s population and market: Czechia, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and Spain. For each country we include some policy recommendations and best practice examples. The recording of our webinar, presenting the key findings can be found on YouTube.