Around 350 participants from the fields of research, higher learning, architecture and planning offices, politics, energy suppliers, cities and municipalities and the real estate sector discussed how the energy supply for buildings and city districts can be shaped to make it viable in the future, as the objective of the German Federal Government is for buildings to be climate-neutral by 2050.

The German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy is planning to pool research and strengthen networking with the new research initiative. This is because in the future buildings will interact on a much larger scale with the electricity grid. The borderlines between electricity producers and electricity consumers will at the same time become fluid. In the future, so-called grid-supportive buildings will increasingly cooperate with the public electricity grid, which will keep ever greater amounts of electricity produced from renewable sources available. Model research projects were presented at the Congress: several "energy-plus" and grid-supportive buildings, various decentralised energy-supply concepts for city districts, new strategies for heating and cooling grids as well as methods and tools with which to simulate and integrate planning of buildings, city districts and municipalities.