Waste heat-to-power with steam and organic Rankine cycles: Potentials and feed-in tariffs in the EU27+UK

Industrial waste heat potential has been recurrently quantified in multiple publications. However, actual valorisation opportunities still need to be better assessed. This work focuses on waste heat-to-power potential in the EU27+UK. In a first step, the impact of waste heat-to-power deployment is quantified per country and major industrial sectors. It is demonstrated that 13'089 GWh/y of electricity, savings of 4'440 ktons/y of CO2, investments of 7'673 M(sic), revenues of 1'688 M(sic)/y and 11'256 jobs would be generated in case industrial waste heat was solely used to produce electricity. In a second step, a major barrier - the lack of specific feed-in tariffs - is addressed. Based on real projects data, the necessary feed-in tariffs are determined and compared with renewable electricity prices of several EU countries. It is demonstrated that heat-to-power solutions would require similar levels of tariffs like solar and biomass. With tariffs ranging from 95-113 (sic)/MWh, steam cycles present the lowest tariffs requirements, while large ORCs require tariffs between 132 and 172 (sic)/MWh. With these results, this work highlights the relevance of waste heat valorisation and a major economic barrier for electricity production in the EU 27 + UK. (c) 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).