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Haley Zaremba is an energy journalist and researcher with more than a decade of professional experience covering global energy systems, land and natural resources, and…
A new breakthrough in high-temperature heat pumps could provide a critical pathway toward relieving global reliance on fossil fuels in industrial contexts. A team of scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE (Fraunhofer ISE) in Germany tested heat pumps at 320 degrees Fahrenheit and proved that they can produce hot water and steam, showing promise for replacing coal in hard-to-abate industrial sectors.
“Data collected from the test rig could allow manufacturers to design heat pumps and heat exchangers for high temperatures, large loads, and changing conditions,” states a recent report from Interesting Engineering.
The scientists at Fraunhofer ISE are testing the rig in a number of different contexts, including with varying heat sources. Heat pumps can source thermal energy in many different ways. According to the International Energy Agency’s definition of a heat pump, the technology can extract heat from sources including (but certainly not limited to) “the surrounding air, geothermal energy stored in the ground, or nearby sources of water or waste heat from a factory.” The pump “then amplifies and transfers the heat to where it is needed.”
The anatomy of a heat pump includes a compressor, which propels a refrigerant through a closed loop, and a heat exchanger, which extracts thermal energy from a given heat source. Then, another heat exchanger moves that thermal energy to a heat sink. In the model being tested by Fraunhofer ISE, the refrigerant being used is butane.
Heat pumps have garnered increasing attention in recent years as a low-cost, resource-efficient part of the decarbonization puzzle. However, most of the buzz around heat pumps has been related to models that operate at much lower temperatures and which would be used in residential and commercial buildings, rather than in industrial applications. These heat pumps would be used to make heating and cooling – a major source of greenhouse gas emissions globally – far more energy efficient. Not only that, they are remarkably cost-effective.
“We’ve come to see climate solutions like paper straws as being something worse than what we’re used to. But there are some places where everyone benefits, and I think heat pumps are a good example of that,” Alexander Gard-Murray, PhD, a political economist at Brown University and co-author of 3H Hybrid Heat Homes: An Incentive Program to Electrify Space Heating and Reduce Energy Bills in American Homes, was quoted by The New York Times earlier this year. “They’re quieter. They offer more control. And at the same time, they’re going to reduce our energy demand and our greenhouse gas emissions. So it’s not just savings. It’s a quality-of-life improvement.”
Indeed, heat pumps are so effective, and the energy cost of heating and cooling homes and buildings is so high, that by some estimates residential heat pumps could cut the United States’ energy consumption in half. As of 2023, some figures suggest that heat pumps had already prevented 8 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions in Europe alone. And as the World Economic Forum wrote in a report from the sidelines of COP27, which heavily featured the potential of heat pumps as an answer to climate change, “the greenest energy is the energy we don’t use.”
This logic holds true for industrial applications of high-temperature heat pumps as well – especially when you consider that the energy that these technologies would be replacing largely comes from coal, the world’s dirtiest fossil fuel. The data being produced at Fraunhofer ISE could help refine a new generation of safe, cost-effective, and low-emissions industrial processes at a time when decarbonization is sorely needed. Targeting hard-to-abate manufacturing processes is one of the trickiest parts of the decarbonization puzzle, and one that we’re now one step closer to solving.
Haley Zaremba is an energy journalist and researcher with more than a decade of professional experience covering global energy systems, land and natural resources, and…
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