Industrial site energy integration – the sleeping giant of energy efficiency? Identifying site specific potentials for vertical integrated production at the example of German steel production

Panel: 4. Technology, products and systems

This is a peer-reviewed paper.

Authors:
Clemens Schneider, Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment, Energy, Germany
Stefan Lechtenböhmer, Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy, Germany

Abstract

Heat integration and industrial symbiosis have been identified as key strategies to foster energy efficient and low carbon manufacturing industries (see e.g. contribution of Working Group III in IPCC’s 5th assessment report). As energy efficiency potentials through horizontal and vertical integration are highly specific by site and technology they are often not explicitly reflected in national energy strategies and GHG emission scenarios. One of the reasons is that the energy models used to formulate such macro-level scenarios lack either the necessary high technical or the spatial micro-level resolution or both. Due to this lack of adequate tools the assumed huge existing potentials for energy efficiency in the energy intensive industry cannot be appropriately appreciated by national or EU level policies.

Due to this background our paper describes a recent approach for a combined micro-macro energy model for selected manufacturing industries. It combines national level technical scenario modelling with a micro-modelling approach analogous to total site analysis (TSA), a methodology used by companies to analyse energy integration potentials on the level of production sites. Current spatial structures are reproduced with capacity, technical and energy efficiency data on the level of single facilities (e.g. blast furnaces) using ETS data and other sources. Based on this, both, the investments in specific technologies and in production sites are modelled and the evolvement of future structures of (interconnected) industry sites are explored in scenarios under different conditions and with different objectives (microeconomic vs. energy efficiency optimization). We further present a preliminary scenario that explores the relevance of these potentials and developments for the German steel industry.