Decarbonization
Process heat is your biggest untouched cost line
Walk any energy-intensive plant — food, paper, chemicals, metals — and you will find that the largest single energy consumer is not the motors, not the lighting, not the compressed air everyone audits. It is heat: the steam and hot air that dries, cooks, evaporates and sterilizes. And in most plants, that heat is produced exactly the way it was twenty years ago — by burning gas.
The reasons were rational. Gas boilers are reliable, understood, and cheap to install. Electricity was expensive and heat could not be stored. So while every other cost line went through generations of optimization, the boiler house was left alone. That rationality has expired on both ends: gas prices have become structurally volatile, carbon costs are rising and spreading, and renewable electricity now regularly trades below gas in many markets, for parts of the day.
The missing piece was storage
The obstacle was never generating heat from electricity — resistance heating is old technology. The obstacle was time: cheap power comes in windows, while continuous production needs heat around the clock. Thermal energy storage closes that gap. Charge the storage when electricity is cheap, discharge steam or hot air continuously, around the clock, at the temperatures process industries actually use. Storage also works the other way round: where a plant already vents heat in flue gas, exhaust or cooling streams, that heat can be captured and returned to the process instead of the atmosphere.
The economics read like a hedge before they read like a sustainability project: you are converting exposure to one volatile commodity into access to another, cheaper and increasingly domestic one. The decarbonization — often the single largest Scope 1 reduction available to a manufacturing site — comes built in. For CFOs, as-a-service commercial models remove even the capital decision: heat becomes an operating cost with a defined price.
Where it fits, and where it does not
The technology is not universal. It rewards continuous or semi-continuous production, meaningful steam or hot-air demand, and a site with grid access. It punishes intermittent operations and low-temperature niches better served by heat pumps. That is precisely why the first step is not a vendor quote but an owner-side feasibility: your load profile, your tariffs, your process; then the technology.
We deliver thermal energy storage with leading European technology partners, from feasibility to integration. See how we work with technology partners.