Industrial Heating and Cooling: Challenge and Opportunity
The industrial heating and cooling market is surging, but it consumes enormous amounts of energy. With customers increasingly worried about their carbon footprint and rising costs, providers need to find solutions which are more energy efficient.
The heating ventilation and cooling market will reach $136.5 billion by 2024, registering a year on year growth rate of 3.9% during that period. The industrial cooling system market, meanwhile, is expected to grow by 5% CAGR between 2016 and 2021 reaching $17.24B. It will be buoyed by overall growth in the construction sector and government initiatives.
As things stand, approximately 75% of the energy for heating and cooling systems comes from fossil fuels, with gas being the most common. 25% comes from low-carbon sources such as biomass, wind, solar, geothermal, and nuclear power. In the future, that figure will rise as demand grows for cleaner solutions.
However, commercial heating and cooling systems can be extremely inefficient. One study suggests 30% of HVAC costs are lost as waste in the average commercial building. It drives up costs and also increases emissions. Indeed, according to a paper from the EU, every year 40% of the total energy produced in Europe comes from the generation of heat for domestic or commercial purposes.
The challenge of meeting growing demand while lowering carbon footprint.
Commercial and industrial customers are increasingly keen to reduce both their carbon footprints and the cost of heating and cooling, which creates an enormous opportunity for companies that can produce more efficient systems. Not only will they be able to pass those savings on to customers, but they will also be able to promote themselves as offering a low carbon alternative.
The sector has set itself the goal of becoming low carbon, but reaching these goals will require significant rethinking. This may be achieved in part by the electrification of heating with heat pumps, electric heaters or with the introduction of more renewable sources.
These are becoming more commercially viable as costs reduce and new technologies come to the fore. Green hydrogen uses water electrolysis with renewable electricity; decarbonised hydrogen uses natural gas reformation with carbon capture and storage while waste hydrogen can be used by taking sources which would otherwise have been flared or burnt for electricity generation.
The HERO® Solution
Until now, it has been difficult to harness the benefits of hydrogen as a commercially scalable clean fuel, but the breakthrough HERO® technology from Star Scientific changes that. It is the first to catalyse hydrogen in a clean, flameless process which produces limitless energy and zero emissions.
HERO® is cleaner, more efficient and more affordable, but best of all it can be retrofitted to a range of power-intensive industrial applications from municipal power plants to large-scale industrial heating and cooling. It’s a win-win proposition for both new and existing markets that will give producers of heating and cooling solutions a vital edge in an increasingly competitive landscape.
“The race is now on between the technoscientific and scientific forces that are destroying the living environment and those that can be harnessed to save it. . . . If the race is won, humanity can emerge in far better condition than when it entered, and with most of the diversity of life still intact.”
E.O. Wilson
The Future Of Life