Construction has begun on a cross-border district heating network linking the German city of Görlitz with its Polish twin city of Zgorzelec, with biomass boilers among the renewable technologies to be deployed as the two cities target full decarbonisation of their heat supply by 2030.
The UNITED HEAT project is a joint venture between Stadtwerke Görlitz, a subsidiary of French utility Veolia, and SEC Zgorzelec, a subsidiary of Germany's E.ON.
The groundbreaking marks the start of work on the first of twelve planned kilometres of pipeline connecting the two cities' previously separate heating networks.
The twin cities have a combined population of around 86,000 on either side of the Neisse River.
Technologies to be deployed include solar thermal energy with seasonal storage, heat recovery from lake water and wastewater, biomass boilers and power-to-heat installations.
The project is expected to cut CO₂ emissions by nearly 50,000 tonnes annually, equivalent to the emissions of approximately 28,000 passenger vehicles.
The project was initiated in 2020 and awarded Cross-Border Renewable Energy (CB-RES) status under the EU's Connecting Europe Facility in 2022, one of only three pioneer projects to receive the designation across Europe.
The German federal government is providing around €80 million through its funding programme for efficient heating networks, with the aim of keeping the impact on consumer prices as low as possible.
The project has also received support from the German Energy Agency (dena) via the German-Polish Energy Platform since 2023.
Combined investment and operational savings are estimated at more than €6 million compared with separate national solutions, with energy prices expected to be almost 8% lower than a purely domestic alternative.
German Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Energy Katherina Reiche, who attended the groundbreaking, said the project demonstrated how municipalities could collaborate across national borders on heat supply.
"By linking the German and Polish district heating networks, the heating sector will be decarbonised cost-effectively and our energy security strengthened," she said.
