Making City Heating Smarter and More Fair

Cities sit at the heart of Europe’s clean energy challenge, and its most powerful opportunities. 

Giulia Conforto is a Senior Researcher at e-think energy research, with deep expertise in developing international projects and partnerships for sustainable energy. Her research focuses on financing the decarbonisation of buildings, heating, and cooling systems, with a emphasis on geothermal energy. She delivers policy and economic assessments, develops capacity building programmes, and drafts and acquires new projects. In this conversation, she explains how the EU-funded ESCALATE project helps municipalities plan cleaner, more energy-efficient heating and cooling systems, and why financial barriers are often not what they seem. 

The ESCALATE project supports Europe’s clean energy shift by helping cities develop their heating and cooling plans. Our mission is to enable local governments, especially those with limited capacity, to create practical, effective, and climate-aligned strategies for heating and cooling, which are typically hard-to-abate sectors. We aim to make planning more accessible, more standardised, and ultimately more impactful by equipping municipalities with the tools, training, and guidance they need to build resilient and low-carbon systems.

Buildings account for around 40% of the EU’s energy use and emissions, and heating and cooling represent the biggest share of that. Unlike electricity, which is decarbonising quickly due to renewables, heating and cooling remain difficult to transform, especially in existing buildings. Making cities more energy-efficient is absolutely essential because urban areas concentrate both the population and infrastructure. If we don’t address energy waste in heating and cooling at the urban level, we simply won’t meet our climate targets. It’s a challenge that requires both policy ambition and local action. 

Medium and smaller municipalities often lack the staff, money, and expertise for heating and cooling plans. ESCALATE works with regional energy agencies to close this gap. These agencies are trained through our project to become external experts that can directly support local authorities. We provide a standardized training platform, a structured planning methodology, and ready-to-use templates and guidelines that ensure compliance with EU directives. This way, even cities with limited capacity can create robust and future-proof heating and cooling strategies.

The training is self-paced and mostly online to make it as accessible as possible. It includes three main sections: the first covers basic planning and data collection, the second dives into technical analysis, and the third focuses on developing strategies. Participants can take one or more parts depending on their roles and needs. We’ve included interactive texts, videos, exercises, and templates to support different learning styles. We’re currently piloting the platform, and once finalised, it will be translated into eight languages. In-person sessions and local workshops will also complement the digital offering to maximise reach and effectiveness.

The threshold comes from the EU Energy Efficiency Directive. It targets cities that are large enough to have a meaningful climate and energy impact but often small enough to lack the technical or administrative resources of larger urban centers. These medium-sized cities make up the majority of municipalities in Europe and contain most of the building stock. They’re often overlooked in national policy frameworks, but they’re crucial for scaling up decarbonisation, especially in heating and cooling.

Challenges include limited technical capacity, resistance to collective heating solutions like district networks, and a general lack of urgency from local decision-makers. Retrofitting is expensive and can be socially sensitive. Most current systems are based on individual fossil fuel boilers, which people are used to. Social acceptance is key, especially when proposing district heating. Surprisingly, financing is often more a perception issue than a real one. If a city shows political will and has a solid technical plan, funding opportunities tend to follow, through national or EU grants, or via blended finance.

Definitely. Lower-income countries often have fewer resources, less administrative capacity, and more outdated infrastructure. But they also tend to have lower labour and material costs, which can make projects more affordable if funding is available. The EU has recognised this and offers mechanisms like the Just Transition Fund and the Modernisation Fund to help level the playing field. Blended finance, combining public grants with private investments, also plays a critical role in making energy efficiency projects bankable in these regions.

Yes. The Renovation Wave initiative aims to double the annual rate of building renovations by 2030, which is a huge step forward. The 2024 recast of the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD) goes even further by mandating that all new buildings must be zero-emission by 2030 and pushes for harmonised building energy certificates across the EU. These policies create the legal and financial signals needed to accelerate renovation and upgrade efforts. Of course, implementation depends on national and local capacity, but overall these frameworks are moving the sector in the right direction.

At a recent Energy Cities Forum, we were approached by representatives from several Ukrainian municipalities who asked for immediate access to our training materials. Their government had mandated the development of local heating plans, but they lacked the tools to do so. That moment really struck us. We realised how powerful and necessary it is to keep our tools open-access and adaptable. We’re now working to include them in our next training round. It was a clear and moving example of how EU-funded resources can make a real difference, even beyond Europe’s borders.