We must act now to decarbonise industrial heat power sources

We are all fully aware of the vital need to transition to low-carbon energy sources in the electricity sector. For the past thirty years, the trio of solar, wind and storage has dominated the public discourse on the energy transition and filled endless column inches, but, most importantly, we have seen great progress across many markets.

For all the progress we have made to introduce renewable power sources at scale, we have overlooked another sector that is crucial to us achieving a low-carbon energy transition by mid-century: industrial heat.

Global industrial heat accounts for 29% of final energy consumption, and it is essential to most industrial processes. It is the energy input that triggers the chemical reactions to make medicine and cleaning products. It is needed to transform metal ore into steel and, eventually, consumer goods like cars. It is used to pasteurise milk, brew beer and dry paper.

Not only does heat make up a significant proportion of global energy demand, but its fuel supply has been dominated by coal, oil, and natural gas. While policy makers and corporates rightly focused on greening the energy supply to global electricity networks, greening the energy supply to industrial heat was left neglected.

Now, there is real impetus to implement renewable heat solutions on an industrial scale. The latest UNFCCC Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) Synthesis Report implies a sizable 16% increase in global greenhouse emissions in 2030 compared to 2010 levels. We can make a real dent in this figure if we start to focus on low- to medium-temperature heat, where various solutions are already commercially available, as opposed to high-temperature heat, where decarbonisation often relies on hydrogen and carbon capture – solutions that are expensive for industry to implement.