Together with the Energy Resilience Leadership Group and the BMW Foundation Herbert Quandt, we co-hosted a roundtable on the challenges for industrial heat and explore the policies and technologies needed to align competitiveness and decarbonization. Our key takeaways from the discussion are:
✅ Electric heat is the most future-proof option for decarbonizing most industrial processes working at high temperatures.
✅ Nonetheless, implementing it requires very cheap energy costs, as energy costs dominate cost differences between alternatives, be they fossil or clean.
✅ It is therefore vital to avoid pathways with high energy losses, e.g. hydrogen, keep pushing for a low-cost decarbonized and expanded grid in any way possible, and also make use of the unique opportunity of cheap thermal storage for these applications.
A big thank you to Florian Nitzinger, Paula Schmid Schmidsfelden, and Dr. Bryan Scheler (BMW Foundation Herbert Quandt) for the great collaboration and excellent organization, as well as Philipp Offenberg (Breakthrough Energy ), Susanne König (KRAFTBLOCK), Thomas Birr (E.ON), Anna Celsing Klingberg (Alfa Laval), Vanessa Z Chan (U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)), and all attendees for a great discussion!
