[joe_mamba]

>In DACH, there's not really an alternative for many homes.

And yet in Austria, most apartment buildings in big cities are still heated by burning heating oil, gas or even firewood. Worst of the worst for air quality.

Walk through Graz in sub-zero winters and it's like you're breathing in a barbeque bonfire. Even your clothes smell like soot when you get home if you've been out too long. Which is bizarre to me, considering how much posturing and chest thumping Austria is doing about how green and anti-Nuclear they are yet they love burring wood and oil. Male this make sense please.

Sure, rich people in the bacon belt living in single family homes in the suburbs or rural areas, have heat pumps, solar panels on the roof and a Tesla in the garage, but that's a different story compared to those living in the city stuck in the fossil fuel stone age, where they have no choice over their rented building's heating method.

How do you convert the city's apartment buildings to heat pumps? Is it a technological limitation? Money limitation? Bureaucratic and political limitation? All of the above?

[ejoebstl]

It's incentives. Landlord pays for the installation and decides, tenant for the operation/heating.

Best way to get around this is making heat pumps more accessible (easy to get, financing options), as well as legislation (banning gas/oil heating).

[joe_mamba]

>Best way to get around this is making heat pumps more accessible (easy to get, financing options), as well as legislation (banning gas/oil heating).

So if people on HN see what the solution is, why isn't the Austrian government doing it, to get rid of polluting fossil fuel heating in the cities?

[ejoebstl]

Austria has really good subsidies for households. The "subsidy stop" the article refers to was stopping 100% subsidies. Austria has an incredibly progressive and green environmental and energy policy.

[joe_mamba]

>Austria has really good subsidies for households. Austria has an incredibly progressive and green environmental and energy policy.

Then why are most Austrian apartment buildings in cities still burning oil and gas for heating and not all switched to heat pumps if it's so green and progressive? Why is Graz air quality getting worse and worse?

> The "subsidy stop" the article refers to was stopping 100% subsidies.

Which article? What subsidies? What are you talking about? I never mentioned anything like this.

[gpm]

Beurocratic and political limitation.

Firewood and heating oil isn't cheaper, it merely has lower upfront cost in exchange for a higher total cost. An efficient governance system (whether that's capitalism and banks with loans or renting out the hearpumps or a centrally planned replacement program or anything else) would figure out the financing and save the system money by updating.

Technology can make the incentives even larger. Excess money can make it easier for the governance system to reach the solution. But it's at the point where without any improvement to either an ideal system would figure out how to make the switch happen.

[c0balt]

There is also a minor incentive problem here, mainly that a landlord can/will often offload the running costs, Nebenkosten, to the renters indefinitely.

That means they are sometimes economically incentivized to choose an option with lower initial cost but a higher running cost. Governments can/do bend these incentives via taxes but it can be hard/expensive to renovate old complexes (and that part cannot directly be offloaded by the landlord).

[joe_mamba]

Sounds like it's something the government can fix on a whim if it wanted to. Why doesn't it?