"From the cement and steel that make our buildings sturdy to the food products that sustain us, the U.S. manufacturing sector produces the building blocks of our modern society. But these products come at a price. Manufacturing accounts for a quarter of all energy-related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in the United States.
Driving down these emissions is a top priority at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), where we're seeking out and investing in innovative solutions to decarbonize the largest source of industrial emissions: heat generation.
Heat is essential and pervasive in manufacturing, accounting for almost half of the sector's CO2 emissions. Industrial heat is also diverse. Heat demand varies across industries, from the relatively low temperatures needed to pasteurize foods or remove moisture in papermaking to the high temperatures needed to produce cement or extract metals from ore.
Today, about 95% of all industrial heat is generated by burning fossil fuels, but making the products we can't live without shouldn't require us to make pollution that we can't live with. That's why, in 2022, DOE created the Industrial Heat Shot to transform the way that manufacturers generate and use heat."
Read this article by Matthew Bauer, program manager for the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Energy Technologies Office Concentrating Solar-Thermal Power (CSP) team, and Zach Pritchard, technology manager with the U.S. Department of Energy's Industrial Efficiency and Decarbonization Office...
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Kat Friedrich
Editor in Chief
American Solar Energy Society
Monona WI
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