ZEROit aims to solve the energy transition challenges of Nuremberg municipality holistically through highly replicable solutions.
This project proposes a smarter, more holistic approach to decarbonizing municipal buildings. By developing tailored pathways for each building, cities can maximize the impact of every investment. Core strategies include transitioning to high-efficiency active systems such as heat pumps, reducing energy demand, integrating renewable energy sources, and enhancing grid flexibility. Together, these measures can enable cities to accelerate renovation efforts, overcome systemic barriers, and achieve meaningful emissions reductions.
To meet climate targets, emissions of buildings need to be lowered immediately. However, most cities are faced with high debt levels and rising prices, slow processes and waiting times for envelope renovations that place a heavy burden on municipal staff and local trades, poor availability of materials and trades, and rapidly approaching emission reduction targets. The most promising efficiency and carbon reduction measures need to be implemented.
ZEROit develops, pilots and validates the following three integrated solutions as part of our place-based approach to achieving urban climate goals.
The city of Nuremberg is a visionary initiator of the project and main client, tester and user of the solutions. The city provides the buildings for Portfolio Planning and Rapid Zero-Emission Renovation. Nuremberg has extensive experience in several EU projects, partly together with empirica, including EDI-Net and procuRE on which ZEROit builds.
Meeting climate targets requires a rapid and substantial reduction in emissions from the building sector. Many municipalities face significant economic and decision-making barriers. Traditional retrofitting strategies tend to focus on large-scale buildings, overlooking the fact that the majority of urban building stock consists of small to medium-sized structures with only moderate energy performance.
In cities like Nuremberg, which manages a portfolio of approximately 1,900 buildings, the scale and complexity of planning individual renovations make the 2035 climate goals seem increasingly unattainable.
The following graphic summarises the progress and stages of the methodology as well as key results.
