Project description
Open-source tool to help energy-intensive industries efficiently use excess heat
Energy systems are the backbone of the manufacturing process and crucial to profitability and competitiveness of the energy-intensive industries. While considerable progress has been achieved to reduce the energy consumption of the main industrial processes, great amounts of energy are lost in the form of waste heat. The EU-funded EMB3Rs project will develop an open-source platform to support a bottom-up characterisation of energy supply and demand. It will also simulate the cost benefits of alternative options for the recovery and use of excess heat for a wide range of industries. By translating industrial excess heat into savings and increased overall system efficiency, EMB3Rs will allow the energy-intensive industries to improve their competitiveness and contribute to the EU climate change mitigation goals.
Objective
The EMB3Rs project will implement a bottom-up, user-driven and open source modelling platform to simulate alternative supply-demand scenarios for the recovery and reuse of industrial excess heat and cold (HC). EMB3Rs’ final users will employ the platform to determine the costs and benefits related with excess HC utilization routes, and to define the required implementation conditions for the most promising solutions. The platform will allow industrial users and other relevant stakeholders to autonomously and intuitively explore and assess the feasibility of new technology and business scenarios. This will benefit each individual producer/ consumer in a given industrial community but also enable win-win solutions between industries and final HC users in other sectors.
The main aim is to reuse and/or trade excess thermal energy in a holistic perspective within an industrial process HC/energy system environment or framed in an HC network in regulated or liberalized markets. The resource and energy intensive industries (REII) and DHC networks will be able to use and rely on the EMB3Rs platform to investigate the revenue potential of using industrial excess HC as an energy (re)source. The REII will be able to evaluate the benefits of investing in low carbon options, such as the integration of renewable HC technologies and thermal storage, in industrial processes.
Ultimately, by translating industrial excess HC into savings, revenues and increased overall system efficiency, EMB3Rs will allow the REII community to improve its competitiveness, foster and accelerate the decarbonisation of the HC market overall and contribute to the EU climate change mitigation goals. Namely by i) contributing to overcome the barriers for developing and deploying in HC solutions, i.e. reaching a critical mass of users, iii) identifying critical framework conditions and success factors and iv) promoting transfer and replication of solutions in other industrial sectors and iv) stimulating the convergence between energy, energy efficiency goals, CO2 reduction and business interests.
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Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
IA - Innovation actionCoordinator
4200-465 Porto
Portugal
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.