Waste heat, a waste of time?: The Reengineer Monitor #44
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Heating and cooling
A huge, 50 megawatt, industrial heat pump is under construction at a site owned by chemicals giant BASF in Germany. While certainly impressive in scale, there are other heat pumps of this size in existence. In 2023, BASF told me that it had canned plans to build a much larger – 120 megawatt – heat pump at the same site, which is in Ludwigshafen.
Heat pumps could be installed in minutes in some homes in Boston, US, under a new pilot programme run by the Boston Housing Authority.
Growing availability of 120 volt heat pump water heaters is reducing the cost of transitioning to highly efficient, electrified water heating systems in the US, according to this story from CleanTechnica.
Is capturing and using waste heat a waste of time? That’s the contention of Addison Stark, chief executive of US-based industrial heat pump manufacturer AtmosZero. He discussed these views on a podcast earlier this year: “Waste heat is not always located in the exact same place at the exact same temperature in every given facility […] So you’re building bespoke one-off heat exchangers with very expensive engineering hours.” And now, in a commentary for academic journal Joule, he and two co-authors have further detailed their stance on this.
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