Assessing Decision-Making Strategies for Cost-Optimal Brewery Electrification Pathways from 2025 to 2050
This work presents a method to evaluate how industrial decision-making strategies influence the decarbonization of breweries through energy-saving and electrification technologies. The approach builds on common practices from Pinch Analysis to identify a set of possible technology investments from 2025 to 2050. The considered options include wort cooling heat recovery, boil-off heat recovery (Pfaduko), a mechanical vapour recompression (MVR) system, a warm-water heat pump (80 °C), a high-temperature heat pump (110 °C), and an electric boiler. After identifying feasible technologies and their expected savings, common industrial decision-making practices, based on payback period (PBP) thresholds, are simulated and compared to a cost-optimized strategy under uncertain future energy price developments. Through 5,000 Monte Carlo simulations, the results show that strategies allowing longer PBPs lead to lower expected total discounted costs (TDC) and higher levels of electrification by 2050. Under current market conditions, only 12 % of the scenarios achieve full electrification with a three-year PBP, whereas this share increases to 48 % with a ten-year PBP. The cost-optimal implementation plan serves as a benchmark for ideal long-term investment behaviour, achieving 5 % lower TDC than the ten-year PBP strategy and 25 % lower than the three-year PBP strategy. The findings reveal that short-term decision-making strategies can create technological lock-in, limiting the adoption of efficient high-temperature heat pumps and delaying industrial decarbonization. Encouraging longer investment horizons could enable faster and more cost-effective electrification of industrial heat demand.