Dr Silvia Madeddu - Industrial Heat is Electrifying!
Last week’s Episode 103 of Cleaning Up with Dr. Silvia Madeddu was a deep dive into the world of industrial heat. If you’re thinking “how dull”, you couldn’t be more wrong! OK, you need some basic knowledge of physics and engineering to keep up with the discussion, but if you do, you will be on the edge of your chair, I promise.
This episode should be required listening for engineering students and recent graduates all over the world, as well as investors and policy-makers caught up in hydrogen hype.
Dr Madeddu is Senior Sustainability Consultant at Schneider Electric as of August this year. In her previous role, Dr Madeddu was Senior Scientist on Industry Decarbonisation at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (2018-2022). She was lead author on the seminal 2020 paper: The CO2 reduction potential for the European industry via direct electrification of heat supply (power-to-heat).
My four main takeaways are as follows:
We are on the edge of another industrial revolution – and I mean a real one, not just a digital one. Electrochemistry and photochemistry may get all the headlines, but good old thermal chemistry still has a big trick up its sleeve, electrification. Silvia’s research showed that 78% of current industrial heat demand in Europe could be met with mature technologies, and 99% with technologies under development. The trope about only gas being able to power high-temperature processes is absolute nonsense.
Producing heat electrically would be more efficient than using it to derive hydrogen and burning it – but that’s not all. Heating industrial processes with electricity is also more efficient on the demand side than those using gas. Think of a microwave oven – it heats only your food, not the surrounding kitchen. Silvia estimates that this effect could deliver between 5% and 20% efficiency improvements for different industrial processes, but that is conservative.
Technology is developing fast. Over the past three years commercial heat pumps have been launched that can deliver steam at 160C and 6 bar – which opens up huge markets for industrial and district heating steam. If you want to use renewable power, you need to deal with its variability; there are innovations here too, involving the buffering of high-temperature heat in thermal batteries. But much more needs to be done to optimise each industrial process – ceramics, glass, annealing, sintering, clinker, etc. The early movers – companies, countries, investors – should be big winners.
What is holding all this back is two things: inertia and economics. Inertia, because equipment manufacturers are not seeing demand for electrified machinery, and their customers are not seeing electrified machinery in the market. Economics, because until recently electricity was three times more expensive than gas per unit of heat, a delta that no amount of efficiency could overcome. High carbon prices and this year’s soaring gas prices are likely to apply the jumper leads.
You can listen to Episode 103 of Cleaning Up with Silvia Madeddu on any good podcast platform or watch it on YouTube.
Next week’s episode will be an audio version of my recent Bloomberg NEF blog, entitled After Ukraine, The Great Clean Energy Acceleration. I look at how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine means that now all three dimensions of the energy trilemma – sustainability, affordability and security – are lined up behind clean energy. The situation in Europe, the Inflation Reduction Act in the USA, and Asian countries’ need to keep up with their strategic competitors mean that we are going to see a substantial acceleration in the net zero transition through the rest of this decade.
If you can’t wait, you can read the blog here; otherwise, see you on next week’s episode of Cleaning Up!