Thomas Kübler has a pulse. “The boiling point couldn’t be higher,” he says. The entrepreneur from the Palatinate has just found out that the cabinet in Berlin wants to decide on that day whether the new Building Energy Act (GEG) will come before the summer break in the Bundestag. Kübler doesn’t even know at this hour whether or how his heating systems have been included in the government draft. “In the worst case,” he says, “it takes away our existence.”
For Kübler, economic existence means heating. More precisely: infrared heaters. Not the small electrically powered ones for the bathroom, but large ones, usually heated with gas, for industrial halls. For very large buildings, with ceilings that can sometimes be more than 20 meters high. He has already equipped almost 20,000 projects with his heaters. They hang in the factories of medium-sized companies like Herrenknecht, in the fish auction hall in Hamburg, in tennis halls, exhibition halls, repair stations. Kübler is the classic small medium-sized company: 135 employees, 15 million euros annual turnover, wholeheartedly involved.
Law “poorly made by hand”
The awards are lined up in the foyer at the company headquarters in Ludwigshafen. He has already won the German Sustainability Prize, the Bavarian State Prize, and the Innovation Prize of the State of Rhineland-Palatinate four times. And now this: Ironically, the flagship law of the energy transition could suffocate his company. Even the debate about it paralyzed sales, he says. Entrepreneurs are no different than private individuals: Nobody will replace their heating until it is clear where they are going.
So much bad politics – the more Kübler talks, the higher the pulse rises. The planned law was promoted one to one by the lobby group “Agora-Energiewende” in the Ministry of Economic Affairs. The fact that new heating systems have to be supplied with at least 65 percent renewable energy is solely due to the heat pump. For Kübler the lobby coup of a green rope team. Instead of limiting CO2 emissions, general specifications for energy use would be made. If something went wrong with the formulation, infrared heaters, which could reduce carbon dioxide emissions by at least half, would be de facto out. He has been doing the energy transition since the company was founded almost 35 years ago, he says. This law was badly made.
In fact, the GEG applies not only to the approximately 22 million residential buildings in Germany, but also to almost 2 million heated non-residential buildings. According to Kübler, industrial halls only make up two percent of the building stock in Germany. But they caused 15 percent of the building-related energy consumption. Kübler’s problem: In the law, halls should probably once again be treated like all other non-residential buildings: like hotels, office buildings, train stations, hospitals and kindergartens.
Heating of industrial halls problematic
Many of these buildings do indeed have a “concrete cover” every 2.5 meters like apartments, which can be converted to heat pumps – but industrial halls? Often poorly insulated, often very high. “It doesn’t work with underfloor heating and 45-degree water.”
Kübler has a saying for his “tour as an itinerant preacher”, as he says himself. In every debate, in every background discussion, he brings it up so that everyone can understand: “Halls are not kindergartens”. The question of whether such a succinct note for experts and members of parliament, who after all decide on a law, is necessary at all, only drives his pulse.
Industrial halls are now usually heated with central boilers. The warm water is pumped into the halls via pipes and blown in as warm air via a heat exchanger. Infrared heaters – Kübler estimates its share of the halls at 5 to 8 percent – work differently: also originally operated primarily with gas, now also with hydrogen or electricity, they do not heat air or water, but skin and surfaces. Like the mountain sun that warms the skier even though the temperatures in the area are below zero. In other words, precisely and precisely, an advantage in halls in which large amounts of air otherwise have to be unnecessarily heated, so to speak.
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