How well can the potential of industrial excess heat be estimated?

Panel: 2. Sustainable production design and supply chain initiatives

This is a peer-reviewed paper.

Authors:
Erwin Cornelis, (Privé), Belgium
Johan Van Bael, VITO NV, Belgium

Abstract

There is a huge potential of industrial waste heat that can be tapped and used to cover heat demand in other sectors. Designers of a sustainable heat and cooling policy need accurate estimates of this potential as an input for their strategies. Some methods to estimate the potential of industrial waste heat have been developed in recent years.

In this paper, three different methods to estimate industrial waste heat are applied on the 384 most energy intensive companies in Flanders, Belgium. These methods are developed in different EU Member States and respectively lead to an estimation of the theoretical and technical potential. These estimates are in addition compared to company specific assessment of the technical waste heat potential made for two subsets of 17 to 18 companies of the 384 companies studied. The aim of this paper is to compare the resulting estimations in order to derive an accuracy of the waste heat potential of industry.

Applying these methods leads to estimates that differ with a factor up to ten dependent on the sector. The first method concludes that, for the whole of the 384 examined companies, theoretically 70% of the fuel is available after consumption as waste heat; whereas the two other methods conclude that technically 20% of the fuel is available after consumption as waste heat, of which 8% has a temperature above 80°C. The validation of these estimates to the company specific assessments confirm these differences. The estimations of the first, second and third method are respectively about 10, 1.5 and 2 to 3 times higher than these company specific assessments.

Based on these results, it is recommended to use a method based on estimated or monitored waste heat assessments of individual companies to estimate the industrial waste heat potential. Still, these estimates can still deviate with a factor 2 to 3 of what in reality can be delivered. Local waste heat potential studies will be needed to validate the estimation results.