The research project EMB3Rs (User-driven Energy-Matching & Business Prospection Tool for Industrial Excess Heat/Cold Reduction, Recovery and Redistribution) is coordinated by INEGI and started in September 2019. The project aimed at developing a planning tool – the EMB3Rs platform – to allow energy-intensive industries and other sources to explore ways of recovering and reusing their excess thermal energy. The EMB3Rs platform promotes the valorisation and utilization of excess thermal energy by enabling the simulation of alternative paths towards recovering, transferring, transporting and selling the energy to different compatible final users including: other processes within a given industrial plant, other industries (intra-sectorial) or other sectors (inter-sectorial).
The EMB3Rs platform encompasses five analysis modules allowing users to estimate available excess thermal energy and map sources and sinks through a user-friendly interface and industrial thermal process optimization models (Core Functionalities), link excess heat supply and demand nodes within least cost distribution routes (GIS). Alternative technological scenarios for excess heat recovery and matching with compatible demand are identified by estimating their cost-benefit (Techno-economic Optimization Module). Users are also able to estimate the benefits of selling the excess heat in centralized and decentralized market structures via the Market Module. Finally, users may explore different business models considering financial and regulatory constraints (Business Module). These different analysis modules are supported by a simulation manager system and have access to a common data repository on default parameters (Knowledge Base).
The EMB3Rs tool has been tested in 7 case studies, and allowed assessing different options for recovery and redistribution of the excess thermal energy in a diversity of contexts to validate the full set of platform functionalities. These included three industry-centric case studies (two energy intensive industries in the UK and Portugal, and one industrial park in Greece). For the network-centric cases (two existing networks in Portugal and Sweden), the EMB3Rs platform was used to assess expansion possibilities. The danish case considered the impacts of innovative market configurations based on P2P networks on the feasibility of integrating excess heat onto an existing DH network, whereas the super-user case deployed the tool to analyse local synergies among a large number of sources and sinks in an area in the centre-region of Portugal.
Both the overall and specific objectives of the project have been reached through the successful deployment of the EMB3Rs platform and of all of its components (modules, and platform infrastructure).
The platform is open, free and user-friendly and doesn't require professional or specialized training (even though training materials have also been produced and made available). Further to this, accompanying documentation is also available for each of the modules and for the platform as a whole. It benefits from an embedded database to overcome eventual data availability limitations from users. The EMB3Rs platform has been successfully tested and validated in all case studies. The development of the tool has been carried out collaboratively with the industrial partners to make sure that their needs and requirements were incorporated into the functionalities of the platform, and of each of its modules.
The platform delivered most of the analysis from the EMB3Rs case studies within a time window ranging from a few minutes to a few hours, depending on the respective level of complexity, and which otherwise, would have taken longer, and / or would likely have returned less accurate results. Furthermore, the implementation of the gamification features allows users to engage into challenges and have different stakeholders work/compete to find a common solution to a problem.
