Significantly less energy was used for heating and hot water in German apartment buildings last year.
Residents of apartment buildings heated significantly more economically after the massive increases in energy prices last year. This emerges from a current evaluation (Techem Atlas for Energy, Heat & Water 2023) by the energy service provider Techem. For their analysis, the so-called final energy consumption in 2023, adjusted for weather effects, decreased by around nine percent compared to 2021. This refers to the energy that is fed into the building for heating, hot water preparation and as electricity. “Since our surveys began in 2011, there has never been such a low consumption of heating energy,” said Joachim Klein, expert for energy and CO2 indicators at Techem.
Nevertheless, greenhouse gas emissions in apartments remained at a high level. The authors of the study justified this with changes in the transport of fossil fuels. This becomes clear using the example of natural gas, which is used to heat over half of the apartments in apartment buildings. If it reached Germany through pipelines, there would be significantly lower emissions than with liquid gas, which is brought by ships from the USA to Europe or Germany, for example, explained the authors of the study.
On average, the users of an apartment building in 2023 emitted a total of 1.92 tons of CO2 just by generating heat for space heating (1.55 tons) and for heating drinking water (0.37 tons). This means that emissions remained roughly at the previous year's level. Together with the emissions from the consumption of household electricity of an average of 1.1 tonnes, the emissions from an apartment in 2023 amounted to an average of three tonnes of greenhouse gases.
The emissions for heating and hot water varied depending on the energy source: apartments that used heating oil emitted by far the most CO2 at around 2.6 tons, heat pumps 1.1 tons and sustainably produced wood pellets 0.1 tons. Overall, fossil fuels remain dominant in heat generation – according to the evaluation, around 90 percent of the apartment building stock uses them to generate heat for heating and hot water. Gas remains the most frequently used fossil energy source. The share of heating oil fell from 16 percent in 2013 to around 9 percent last year.
The study is based on the analysis of data from last year on consumption and costs for heating and hot water from 1.2 million apartments in around 110,000 apartment buildings in Germany. 2021 was used as a basis for comparison for the consumption of heating energy, as there were massive price increases with the start of the Ukraine war, which also had an impact on consumption behavior, as energy expert Klein explained.
