SO WHAT
An integrated tool to support industries, energy utilities and municipalities for the exploitation of Waste Heat and Waste Cold
| Business | Period | Project coordinator | Funding scheme |
|---|---|---|---|
| R&D | Start date: 1 June 2019 End date: 31 May 2022 |
Francesco Peccianti - RINA Consulting S.p.A. | H2020 - IA - Innovation action |
Challenge
The amount of heat wasted by industries in the form of hot water or flue gases is sufficient to cover 100% of EU’s heating needs, but the potential of waste heat and cold (WH/C ) is still unlocked due to a number of technical/non-technical barriers:
- Perception of technological reliability of the solutions needs to be improved
- Procedures, contracts, authorization
- Requirements need to be studied updated to facilitate the investments
- Conventional business and risk models have to be revisited and dedicated framework tailored to these investments still needs to be developed
- Innovative and economically viable transportable Thermal Energy Storage solutions has to be studied
SO WHAT has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 847097 to promote WH/C recovery and Renewable Energy Sources integration at industrial scale tackling all these challenges.
Therefore, SO WHAT main objective is to develop and demonstrate an integrated and easy-to-use tool which will support industries and energy utilities in selecting, simulating and comparing alternative Waste Heat and Waste Cold exploitation technologies that could cost-effectively balance the local forecasted Heating & cooling demand also via RES integration.
Approach
RINA is the Project Coordinator of SO WHAT.
RINA is in charge of mapping the heating and cooling demand and Renewable Energy Sources potential and their integration in the industrial environment. Moreover, we are in charge of SO WHAT tool validation in real industrial demo-cases in order to:
- Define the instrumentation equipment (network of sensors, actuators, etc.) required for the diagnosis and validation monitoring;
- Validate and fine-tune of SO WHAT tool based on real data from the monitoring platform deployed in the demo cases;
- Demonstrate the techno-economic feasibility of industrial heat/cold recovery
- Ensure maximized scalability and replicability of results outlining innovative pathways for rapid replication across EU.
Conclusion
SO WHAT Project Consortium will design an integrated tool to support industries, energy utilities and municipalities in:
- Auditing the industrial process to understand where waste heat and waste cold could be valorized;
- Mapping the potential of locally available RES sources to be integrated with Waste Heat/Waste Cold (WH/C) potential;
- Mapping the local forecasted demand for heating and cooling;
- Define and simulate alternative cost-effective scenarios based on WH/C technologies also leveraging Thermal Energy Storage introduction with proven economic viability;
- Evaluate the impacts (in terms of energetic, economic and environmental KPIs) that the adoption of the new scenarios will generate against the current situation (i.e., baseline) both at industrial and local level;
- Promoting innovative contractual arrangements and financing models to guarantee economically viable solutions and less risky investments.
