Industrial excess heat and residential heating - Potentials and costs based on different heat transport technologies

Using industrial excess heat for residential heating can increase energy efficiency and thus be part of the solution to achieving the EU's climate targets. However, industrial plants are often located in industrial areas and thus away from residential areas. Therefore, the excess heat has to be trans ported to the end-using households. In this paper, we determine the economic excess heat poten tial for residential heating in Germany, considering different transport technologies. For this pur pose, we develop a bottom-up optimisation model, which identifies the technology with the lowest transport cost for over 6,000 excess heat sources. In addition, an optimisation is carried out to max imise the amount of used excess heat, taking into account cost thresholds. Our results show that about 12-17 TWh of excess heat can be utilised up to the cost threshold of 0.1 €/kWh. We see that district heating is the most selected technology for cost optimisation. When optimising the amount of excess heat used, however, it becomes apparent that the technologies sewer networks and sorp tion cycles are also used. The technologies for using industrial excess heat are available, but the next step must be market penetration and up-scaling.