Developing a georeferenced database of energy-intensive industry plants for estimation of excess heat potentials

Industrial excess heat may be one of the pillars needed to transform the energy system. Integrating excess heat in district heating networks can reduce the primary energy demand of the heating sector. Thus, industrial sites need to be analysed in high spatial resolution with regard to heating demand and excess heat potentials. This paper presents a methodology to estimate site-specific excess heat potentials for industrial plants in Europe. Different data sources are matched and analysed to collect information about CO2 emissions, subsector (NACE and ETS activity), process and production capacity per site in the EU28, Switzerland and Norway. From this dataset of energy-intensive industries (steel, paper, cement and glass), the fuel demand is calculated for each site and process. Two different approaches are used to calculate the fuel demand: first, based on the CO2 emissions, and second, the production capacity in tonnes per year of each site. These two approaches are compared and their accuracy is analysed. In this paper, the excess heat potentials for the most important industrial sectors in Europe are estimated based on process-specific fuel demand for different temperature levels.