Communal heat planning: Overcoming the path-dependency of natural gas in residential heating?

•Communal heat planning is a first step to develop a strategy for dealing with path dependencies form NG in residential heating.•The natural gas (NG) distribution grid has a high potential for locking in NG in low-temperature heat supply.•Adequate governance strategies and plans for implementing the decommissioning of distribution grids must be set up to prevent lock-in.•To overcome all identified path dependencies from NG further policy measures are necessary.•Policy instruments on federal, state and municipal level must be well interlinked to allow the implementation of municipal heat plans.