Heat pumps show promise in industrial applications
As heat pump technology grows in attractiveness across Europe, Australia has also turned its eye in direction of renewable electricity in industrial options.
Industrial enterprises these as brewers, pet food items producers and foodstuff processors are checking out whether thermal storage and heat pumps could enable reduce the use of purely natural gases.
ARENA equipped $460,500 in funding to the Australian Alliance for Energy Efficiency (A2EP) to enable examine these choices. During the pre-feasibility scientific studies, 10 companies took part in creating the swap to renewable energy.
When not nevertheless widely employed in Australia, a report by World wide Current market Insights predicts the European industrial heat pump market place will raise to USD $300m by 2027. In Scandinavia by itself, the technologies has taken important market share away from traditional fuel boilers.
Two further corporations are now setting up to transition to renewable electricity right after the A2EP scientific tests, like the 3 Ravens Brewery in Melbourne and Hardwick Meatworks in regional Victoria.
They both equally approach to use renewable electrical power from current solar arrays to electrical power heat pumps, and also transfer waste heat from chillers to develop hot h2o for cleaning, sterilisation and packaging.
A2EP CEO Jarrod Leak claims heat pumps are proving to be a fantastic alternative to boost power efficiency and decarbonise heating underneath 100 levels celsius.
“Almost all meals and beverage processing has a desire for sub-100°C heat, specifically for cleaning and sterilising, but also for lots of drying apps,” he claims.
He describes the new heat pump technology remaining made for 150°C warmth will have the means to transform a lot of additional industries these kinds of as brick and paper producing.
Mark Hardwick of Hardwick Meatworks suggests A2EP’s job enabled them to investigate no matter whether warmth pump engineering was suitable for their business enterprise.
“The economics of the research proved that the implementation of the warmth pump for the web-site had a robust business enterprise situation,” he says.
The company’s renewable changeover involves adding a warmth pump with 1,000kW (thermal) of output to their present microgrid. Based mostly on estimates, this would lower Hardwick’s gasoline usage by 75 per cent and reduce CO2 emissions by 450 tonnes. The 1,107MWh per year maximize in electrical power intake would be offset by 1,000MWh of energy produced by a 2nd stage of a solar farm task.
In an interview on ABC’s Four Corners, Hardwick said it’s supporting to lower the company’s footprint.
“Red meat is an intensive kind of output, and something we can do as a business to decrease our footprint as component of that system is great for us, great for the market,” he claimed.
More substantial businesses such as Carlton & United Breweries, Lion and Sunmetals have also fully commited to 100 per cent renewable electricity by 2040.
Leak predicts an uptake in these new systems will stimulate extra than $50 million of financial investment for each year and build hundreds of local employment.
“The possible reduction in normal gasoline use for the producing sector would be extra than 5 PJ/annum or extra than 255,000 tonnes for each annum of CO2,” he states. “This will perform an important role in reducing Australia’s emissions in the ‘hard to abate’ location of course of action heating.”