How to widen the valley of opportunity for industrial heat pumps?
Strategies to deliver CO2-neutral heat to industrial processes mostly involve electrification. In view of operational costs, heat pumps are preferred over E-Boilers due to higher Coefficients of Performance (COP) that can be achieved. On first sight an obvious integration concept is to replace a fossil-fuel fired boiler by a central heat pump. This results in a high capacity heat pump with an attractive CAPEX per unit power. However, such an arrangement typically result in COPs of about 1.8 or lower. Thus the Return on Investment (ROI) is only acceptable in a few countries where the electricity to gas price ratio is very low. Clearly no market on a European scale can be expected. This defines the right slope of the “valley of opportunities”. From a thermodynamic perspective, a local heat pump close to a process is preferable. In this case the difference between heat delivery temperature and waste heat temperature is smallest. This leads to very attractive COPs. However, the smaller capacity results in a high CAPEX per unit power. This makes the ROI again not acceptable. This defines the left slope of the valley. We present multiple options to widen the valley. First we discuss technological developments leading to a higher COP and a lower CAPEX, bringing the left slope down. Next, we show that cooperation between heat pump supplier and process experts of the customer can lead to a design with lower heat delivery temperatures. Another solution is to deliver the heat at multiple temperature levels. In this way we bring the right slope down. We conclude that this approach enables us to engineer solutions tailored for the customer. Doing so, we offer attractive heat pump solutions for a wide range of operational situations.