Energy is a significant cost for most manufacturers, particularly for energy-intensive industries like chemicals, pulp and paper, and food and beverage. Despite being a major operational expense, a significant portion of the energy required to power industrial processes is released to the atmosphere as waste heat, in the form of exhaust or cooling water.
An advanced heat recovery system captures and repurposes wasted heat energy and converts it into usable energy. By increasing the facility’s efficiency, these systems result in significant cost savings and align operations with emissions reduction goals.
Here’s a closer look at how these systems work and the benefits of implementing them.
How Does A Heat Recovery System Work?
Industrial facilities generate waste heat through equipment like boilers, furnaces, refrigeration units, and compressed air systems. For instance, paper plants create exhaust from the machinery that processes pulp, which can be a source of waste heat.
Similarly, chemical or ethanol plants often use thermal oxidizers to turn contaminants into carbon dioxide, while food and beverage plants emit a significant amount of heat from fryers and ovens.
A heat recovery system helps facilities capture this wasted energy and reintegrate it to support processes like generating steam, preheating water, or powering HVAC systems, maximizing energy savings.
Some industrial Heat pumps are important heat recovery systems that can capture and upgrade low-temperature waste heat.
Mechanical vapor recompression steam-generating heat pumps capture low-temperature waste heat and upgrade it to steam using electricity. These heat pumps are among the most efficient, producing boiler-quality steam with about a third of the energy required by traditional boilers.
Key Benefits of Implementing Heat Recovery Systems in Your Facility
Optimizing facility efficiency with a heat recovery unit like a heat pump offers significant financial, environmental, and operational benefits. Here are just a few reasons to consider them.
Reducing Energy Costs and Increasing Efficiency
Tapping into waste heat in industrial applications lowers energy consumption. For example, by upcycling waste heat, an industrial facility could cut its natural gas use by over one-third, translating into substantial savings. This method helps facilities reuse already-generated and paid-for energy, optimizing their budget and minimizing environmental impact from additional energy production.
When it comes to achieving cost savings, choosing the right technology makes a significant difference. For instance, the Skyven Arcturus mechanical vapor recompression steam-generating heat pump uses 30-50% less electricity than electric boilers, producing steam at a much lower cost. It also allows facilities to use less natural gas by reducing loading on fossil fuel-fired boilers.
With Skyven Arcturus installed, an industrial manufacturing facility could see annual savings of over $1,000,000 per year.
Enhancing Facility Productivity and Operational Efficiency
Most heat recovery systems improve operational efficiency by reducing dependency on primary heating systems, extending equipment life, decreasing maintenance, and avoiding unnecessary downtime, which all contribute to a more efficient and cost-effective operation. Installing Arcturus increases a facility’s steam reliability by supplying additional steam at baseload operations. Because it operates in parallel with existing boiler systems, it also allows those systems to run longer.
Reducing Air Pollution
The manufacturing sector accounts for nearly a third of all global emissions, with about half of those originating from fossil-fuel powered steam boilers. Many industrial facilities have sustainability goals that include reducing on-site emissions. Utilizing waste heat instead of relying on new energy production accomplishes this goal.
With Skyven Arcturus, a paper processing plant could save $830,000 in energy costs per year and reduce its Scope 1 and Scope 2 carbon emissions by more than 96,000 metric tons.
That’s equivalent to taking 21,000 gas-powered cars off the road for a year.
Practical Considerations When Implementing Heat Recovery Systems
Implementing a heat recovery system should begin with a comprehensive assessment of your facility’s energy requirements and infrastructure compatibility to maximize the system’s benefits.
This initial step involves careful evaluation of operational demands and consideration of system compatibility, installation costs, and the expected payback period. Having a solid understanding of these elements is essential to ensuring seamless integration with existing processes, allowing facilities to capture and repurpose waste heat without disrupting ongoing operations.
Evaluating Your Facility’s Waste Heat Potential
By understanding where energy losses occur, facilities can make targeted improvements with the highest return on investment (ROI).
Before selecting an energy-efficient heat recovery system, you could conduct a full energy audit to identify waste heat sources and potential recovery opportunities. Specialized analysis tools and processes can provide accurate data to inform the right system choice for your facility.
There are several options for these, including:
- A thermal efficiency analysis, which evaluates your total energy used, identifying waste heat sources and calculating the ratio of useful energy output to total energy input. Infrared cameras and heat sensors can pinpoint lost energy from boilers, compressors, and exhaust systems. Facilities with high energy demands, such as manufacturing and food processing, benefit significantly from this analysis.
- A pinch point analysis, which calculates the minimum possible energy consumption achievable with peak heat recovery, allowing facilities to compare their current energy use to these optimal levels. Through this comparison, manufacturing plants can determine how much they could improve by enhancing heat recovery practices.
These analyses can help to identify more specific opportunities to reduce energy consumption, such as implementing heat recovery projects, exploring cogeneration possibilities, and identifying uses for heat pumps. It also highlights water use reduction projects that contribute to energy savings, offering a comprehensive approach to minimizing energy and resource waste in industrial processes.
However, these analyses can take months of on-site consultation to complete. Fortunately, there are solutions that can significantly reduce the time involved in pre-engineering heat recovery systems. Skyven’s Galileo modeling software has been trained in a growing database of digital twin models for a variety of manufacturing facilities, allowing it to identify decarbonization solutions within hours based on specific inputs from your plant. The system has been used to identify over $480 million in fuel cost savings at over 130 facilities.
Managing Installation and Integration with Existing Systems
In some cases, implementing new systems requires removing existing infrastructure, such as boilers. This is often impractical, costly, and leaves manufacturers without a backup. That’s why it’s critical to ensure heat recovery systems integrate well with existing infrastructures and industrial processes to minimize disruptions. This requires extensive engineering and expertise, and it can still be time-consuming and costly without the right partner.
Costs and ROI Expectations
Implementing an advanced heat recovery system often involves considerable upfront costs, which can be a barrier for many companies. In part because of the custom engineering required, these projects can cost valuable time and money.
Why Skyven Arcturus Is the Ideal Heat Recovery System
Skyven Arcturus is a mechanical vapor recompression steam-generating heat pump (MVR SGHP) that captures low-temperature waste heat and upgrades it to produce boiler-quality steam more efficiently than traditional boilers or other heat pumps. Arcturus is over three times more efficient than traditional boilers and it uses 30-50% less electricity than electric boilers, producing steam at a lower cost.
This efficiency increase leads to considerable savings for manufacturers, without requiring them to replace their existing steam generation systems.
Because Arcturus is installed in parallel with existing steam generation systems, manufacturers can maintain continuous production during deployment. This redundancy also enables a unique fuel-switching strategy to generate the lowest cost steam at any given time, as steam production can revert to the existing steam generation system if electricity prices are high.
With this model, companies are never dependent on a single power source, safeguarding them from grid outages, instability, and energy price volatility and increasing the overall resilience of the grid.
Skyven’s Energy-as-a-Service (EaaS) no-CapEx model also allows facilities to adopt these systems without the need for large upfront expenditures. They can begin achieving energy savings and operational improvements immediately, with economic benefits shared with Skyven.
No matter the approach, the evidence shows the long-term financial benefits of advanced heat recovery technology make them a worthwhile investment, as facilities significantly reduce energy expenses. By capturing and reusing waste heat, facilities experience a steady decrease in operating costs, often leading to a shorter payback period. These solutions are designed to deliver sustainable savings, allowing industrial companies and manufacturers to improve their energy efficiency and cost-effectiveness over time.
If you’re ready to start saving on energy costs while reducing your carbon footprint, contact Skyven Technologies today to discuss energy solutions for your facility.
