GREENSPIRE - Green Strategies & Partnerships for Industrial Renewable Heat

Challenge

Heat decarbonization of European industries is mandatory to reach the expected EU targets of CO2 and pollutants emission reduction by 2030 and 2050. While power grid decarbonization has already reached promising results, the decarbonization of European heat demand is still to begin, in particular in the industry sector.

Process industries are characterised by complex infrastructures in which production processes and energy facilities are interrelated and jointly operated. The overall complexity is squared because process industries need to control the production processes and, at the same time, the local heat generation, storage and distribution.

Solution

GREENSPIRE aims to tackle the barriers to implement renewable heat solutions in the European businesses/industries proposing the concept of sustainable heat symbiosis, where the companies share assets of different renewable heat technologies by innovative collaborative business models.

Solar thermal, high temperature heat pumps and thermal energy storages (TES) are the renewable heat technologies that are going to be explored with the recovery of waste heat streams during the project. Interesting synergies are possible combining these technologies to supply several businesses/industries simultaneously.

Expected outcome

GREENSPIRE is organized around six pilots of sustainable heat symbiosis in Spain, Denmark, Belgium, and Greece. Their exploitation will serve as means for upscaling similar developments elsewhere and foster the uptake of renewable heat in the industrial sector.

The project will also contribute to remove the barriers that hinder energy cooperation, proving the value of energy collaboration.

The project expects at least 33 companies implementing energy cooperation approaches, final energy savings triggered by the project of 26.16 GWh GWh/year during the project and 4.493 tCO2-eq/year avoided, triggering a total investment of 40.950 million Euro.