Electric boilers and resistance heating for industry

Industry is the backbone of modern civilization, but it's also one of the biggest sources of greenhouse gas emissions. Manufacturing steel, cement, chemicals, and plastics doesn't just burn fossil fuels for energy — these processes often require fossil fuels as raw ingredients or release CO2 as an unavoidable part of the chemistry itself.

This creates a massive challenge. We can't simply swap in renewable electricity and call it solved. Heavy industry needs fundamentally different approaches: new chemistries, new materials, new ways of thinking about how we make things. The scale is enormous — industry accounts for about a quarter of global emissions — but so is the opportunity to transform how we build our world.

Most industrial processes need heat — lots of it. Food processing, paper mills, textile manufacturing, glass making, and metal working all require temperatures ranging from warm to blazingly hot. Today, this heat almost always comes from burning natural gas, coal, or oil directly in furnaces and boilers.

Electrifying industrial heat is technically challenging because electricity is expensive compared to fossil fuels, and some processes need extremely high temperatures that are hard to reach efficiently with electricity. But industrial heat accounts for about 10% of global energy use, so solving this problem is crucial for decarbonizing the economy.

This straightforward approach replaces gas boilers with electric ones, using renewable electricity to generate steam and hot water for industrial processes. Electric resistance heating can reach very high temperatures but uses a lot of electricity. It works best when renewable electricity is abundant and cheap, and for processes that can be flexible about when they use energy to take advantage of variable renewable power.