Strategic heating and cooling planning to shape our future cities

Strategic heating and cooling (H&C) planning has proven to be an effective tool to drive the decarbonisation of H&C in cit ies. In this paper, success factors and key challenges of strategic H&C plans are analysed based on semi-structured interviews and an online survey with stakeholders from Germany. The 241 participants of the online survey see CO2 neutrality as the main objective of strategic H&C plans. The most important success factors are good communication and data availability.
Particularly challenging are having common goals, enough staff as well as data availability. Targets and guidelines are more important if the city is obligated to strategic H&C planning. In general, the instrument is seen as effective and suitable to tackle climate change in cities by the participants. The results of this paper can help policy makers and stakeholders to develop successful H&C plans and, thus, to tackle decarbonisation of H&C in cities.