As part of the EU strategic agenda to build a climate-neutral and green Europe, increasing energy efficiency of industry is among the priorities of the Green Deal. Process heat has a significant weight in the total energy demand of the European industry and increased energy efficiency of industry through the recovery and upgrade of waste heat is one of the first steps towards decarbonization in the industrial sector.

Although different heat upgrade technologies exist, their wide deployment is not taking place due to different technical and non-technical barriers hindering the uptake. PUSH2HEAT will aim to overcome these implementation barriers and push forward the market potential and business models of heat upgrade technologies by real full scale demonstration of different heat upgrade systems in relevant industrial sectors with high waste heat recovery and upgrading potential, with supply temperature in the range 90-160ºC.

Different heat upgrade technologies will be scaled-up to optimize their efficiency and economic performance and demonstrated in selected industrial demo-sites covering a representative sample of the most relevant industrial processes with heat recovery potential.
Economic and country specific regulatory barriers, summed up to the technical ones, greatly influence the deployment of the heat upgrade technologies. To tackle this, PUSH2HEAT intends to demonstrate suitable busines models and dedicated exploitation roadmaps for a higher penetration of heat upgrade systems aiming to contribute to meet the industry decarbonization targets.

For achieving its ambitions, PUSH2HEAT consortium gathers different heat upgrade technology manufacturers, industrial end-users where demonstrations will take place, engineering and business oriented companies as well as expert RTD partners in the field, together with the European association representing the heat upgrade technologies stakeholders.