The 2024 Act!onHeat Training Programme has begun

The 2024 season of theAct!onHeat Training Programme has successfully taken off. This week, participants from energy agencies, regional and local governments, and experts in the field came together in the first out of three webinars. The first session focused on moving from Heating & Cooling Plans to identifying specific actions for the roll out of these plans. Policy frameworks vary per country, with tailored outcomes required for each case.

Project Coordinator of Fraunhofer ISI Ali Aydemir opened the webinar with a discussion about the importance of ensuring that policy adequately adapts to new measures identified for strategic goals. He mapped out the “political house of climate protection,” in line with the new EU green deal, where he outlined the history and future trajectories of Heating & Cooling planning policy across the EU. See his full presentation here.

Participants then heard from Jakobi Pedersen of Hillerød Forsyning, who gave a presentation on new district heating systems in the Danish context. Jakobi gave a snapshot into the Danish government’s targets - to remove natural and oil from space heating altogether, in favour of district heating or heat pumps. He talked through district heating from the perspectives of the involved stakeholders, including owners, customers and companies, and mapped out the current and planned district heating landscape in Hillerød, where he shared the wins and challenges of these systems. See his full presentation here.

Valentin Fried of German Energy Agency (dena) talked about identifying H&C measures in the German context, where he presented the REDI4HEAT project, which examines the transposition of EU regulations. Valentina provided an overview of the current state of energy consumption in Germany, where he explored the policy measures that have been put in place in the H&C sphere. Valentina also talked about the wärmeplanungsgesetz, a law for mandatory municipal heat planning in Germany. Valentin spoke in detail about the municipal heat planning in the city of Giengen an der Brenz. See his full presentation here.

Interested to dive deeper into these topics? Check out the session recording and full presentations here.

Ready for more? The second session of the Training Programme will take place on 4 April at 11:00 CET where we will discuss Designing district heating and cooling networks with THERMOS.

Register and learn more about the next sessions here.