Proportion of Waste Heat versus Total Industry Energy Use

A recent client engagement illustrated the value of analysing existing technology road maps as a means of focussing business development efforts.

For context, Dr Malcolm Jacques is an Executive Director of Wasabi Energy. One of Wasabi’s subsidiaries Global Geothermal Limited owns technology that enables heat to be translated into electricity.  The Kalina Cycle offers advancements over the Rankine Cycle for generating electricity from relatively low temperature sources of heat such as renewable energy (geothermal, solar thermal) and waste heat  (power stations, steel furnaces, cement kilns etc). The Kalina Energy Cycle uses a working fluid consisting of a variable concentration ammonia-water mixture that behaves in a thermodynamically superior manner at lower temperatures.

The initial questions that we helped Malcolm to answer with respect to generating electricity from sources of heat were as follows:

• is this a solution to a known problem?
• which industry sectors recognise the problem as a priority?
• in what applications is the proposed solution likely to be most useful?
• is the solution a priority in all geographies?

Roadmaps happen to be a great resource when considering these issues. Armed with answers to these questions business development efforts can be targeted to markets where demand pull, and hence market traction, is likely to be strongest.

Of course in any situation like this it’s feasible to simply use logic to simply list all those industry sectors that use or generate lots of heat energy and to work through this list systematically. In this instance Malcolm was interested in pinpointing his efforts by concentrating on potential markets where a solution was already recognised as a priority.

Technology roadmaps are a particularly useful guide in developing answers for these and other important questions at the front end of innovation or in market development because you are receiving the distilled thoughts of a population of industry experts not just an off the cuff remark from a snatched conversation.

A key word search of our technology roadmap library immediately identified several documents that were useful.

• First, roadmaps are available from Europe, Japan and the US that deal with waste heat recovery as an energy efficiency measure.

Analysis of these roadmaps identified not just the industries that use a great deal of heat energy but also those where onsite energy losses were a significant proportion of energy used. A cross industry technology matrix tabulated six out of sixteen major industry sectors that ranked waste heat recovery improvements amongst their top priorities for investment.

• Second, we reviewed technology roadmaps derived from each of the nominated six target industries (plus geothermal and solar thermal and biomass renewable energy roadmaps) for Australia, Japan, the European Union, Canada, Korea, and the US over several timeframes.

The result was a rich picture containing significant useful data. This helped us identify the industry segments and applications where heat recovery opportunities were largest and most interesting to Wasabi Energy.

Quickly targeting business development efforts, based on the considered opinions of acknowledged industry experts in several jurisdictions, has helped focus market development efforts and deliver immediate traction – something that might have come with significant additional effort in the absence of the analysis of the thirty eight relevant roadmaps our search uncovered.

Surprisingly, according to their roadmaps, two of the top six energy losing industries do not regard waste heat recovery as amongst their top priorities. Understanding this fact helped Malcolm to avoid wasting resources targeting those industries.