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Vienna reveals new plan for how to move away from gas heating

Authorities in Vienna want to replace the city's 600,000 gas heating systems with greener alternatives and have presented a plan for how they will do it.

Published: 7 May 2024 16:25 CEST
Vienna reveals new plan for how to move away from gas heating
Wien Energies' heat pump plant is a part of Austria's drive to reduce carbon emissions and its dependence on Russian gas. (Photo by Vianey Lorin / AFP)

The “Vienna Heat Plan 2024” was presented this week which outlines a concrete strategy for replacing the city’s 600,000 currently installed gas heating systems with renewable energy alternatives.

Vienna has committed to ending its reliance on fossil fuels for heating and hot water by 2040.

As part of this goal, the capital wants to replace around 600,000 gas heating systems with renewable energy alternatives. On Monday May 8th the city presented the “Vienna Heat Plan 2024”, providing a clear plan for this transition.

The plan considers all buildings in the urban area and identifies where it is possible to expanding district heating, referring to a centralised heating system which efficiently serve multiple buildings.

The goal is to make district heating completely climate-neutral by 2040. Additionally, the plan also identifies areas where alternative solutions may be necessary, reported ORF.

The plan divides areas in three categories 

The areas in Vienna have been categorised into three groups based on demand and local conditions.

The first category include areas where district heating is most suitable.

The second category refers to areas with good potential for local heating networks. These networks can accommodate smaller, localised heating systems that serve buildings located close to each other. Additionally, the third category includes areas where individual climate-neutral heating solutions are needed for single buildings or properties, ensuring necessary adjustment to specific needs of a property.

Additional divisions within these groups have been made, considering factors like existing district heating connections and the possibility of expansion. The city wants to expand the district heating network to cover 1,700 kilometres in the future, according to Vienna.at.

READ ALSO: Austria climate activist aims to take fight to Brussels

Geothermal energy planned to be used in outer districts

The areas selected for local heating networks are mainly situated in the outer districts of the city. In those areas authorities plan to use geothermal energy, heat derived from the Earth’s core. Through the use of heat pumps, the plan is to supply heat to multiple buildings simultaneously, reported ORF.

READ NEXT: Vast Vienna wastewater heat pumps showcase EU climate drive

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VIENNA

Vienna Festival director Milo Rau hits back at anti-Semitism accusations

One of the latest events in Europe to be hit with accusations of anti-Semitism, the Vienna Festival kicks off Friday, with its new director, Milo Rau, urging that places of culture be kept free of the "antagonism" of the Israel-Hamas war while still tackling difficult issues.

Published: 17 May 2024 14:48 CEST
Vienna Festival director Milo Rau hits back at anti-Semitism accusations

As the conflict in Gaza sharply polarises opinion, “we must be inflexible” in defending the free exchange of ideas and opinions, the acclaimed Swiss director told AFP in an interview this week.

“I’m not going to take a step aside… If we let the antagonism of the war and of our society seep into our cultural and academic institutions, we will have completely lost,” said the 47-year-old, who will inaugurate the Wiener Festwochen, a festival of theatre, concerts, opera, film and lectures that runs until June 23rd in the Austrian capital and that has taken on a more political turn under his tenure.

The Swiss director has made his name as a provocateur, whether travelling to Moscow to stage a re-enactment of the trial of Russian protest punk band Pussy Riot, using children to play out the story of notorious Belgian paedophile Marc Dutroux, or trying to recruit Islamic State jihadists as actors.

Completely ridiculous 

The Vienna Festival has angered Austria’s conservative-led government — which is close to Israel — by inviting Greek former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis and French Nobel Prize winner for literature Annie Ernaux, both considered too critical of Israel.

A speech ahead of the festival on Judenplatz (Jews’ Square) by Israeli-German philosopher Omri Boehm — who has called for replacing Israel with a bi-national state for Arabs and Jews —  also made noise.

“Who will be left to invite?  Every day, there are around ten articles accusing us of being anti-Semitic, saying that our flag looks like the Palestinian flag, completely ridiculous things,” Rau said, as he worked from a giant bed which has been especially designed by art students and installed at the festival office.

Hamas’ bloody October 7th assault on southern Israel and the devastating Israeli response have stoked existing rancour over the Middle East conflict between two diametrically opposed camps in Europe.

In this climate, “listening to the other side is already treachery,” lamented the artistic director.

“Wars begin in this impossibility of listening, and I find it sad that we Europeans are repeating war at our level,” he said.

As head of also the NTGent theatre in the Belgian city of Ghent, he adds his time currently “is divided between a pro-Palestinian country and a pro-Israeli country,” or between “colonial guilt” in Belgium and “genocide guilt” in Austria, Adolf Hitler’s birthplace.

Institutional revolution

The “Free Republic of Vienna” will be proclaimed on Friday as this year’s Vienna Festival celebrates. according to Rau, “a second modernism, democratic, open to the world” in the city of the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, and artist and symbolist master Gustav Klimt.

Some 50,000 people are expected to attend the opening ceremony on the square in front of Vienna’s majestic neo-Gothic town hall.

With Rau describing it as an “institutional revolution” and unlike any other festival in Europe, the republic has its own anthem, its own flag and a council made up of Viennese citizens, as well as honorary members, including Varoufakis and Ernaux, who will participate virtually in the debates.

The republic will also have show trials — with real lawyers, judges and politicians participating — on three weekends.

Though there won’t be any verdicts, Rau himself will be in the dock to embody “the elitist art system”, followed by the republic of Austria and finally by the anti-immigrant far-right Freedom Party (FPOe), which leads polls in the Alpine EU member ahead of September national elections.

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