High-temperature heat pumps (HTHPs) are an emerging technology to improve overall process efficiency and reduce energy demand while enabling a switch from fossil fuels to renewable electricity. New industrial HTHP technologies aim to achieve an output heat temperature of 250 °C, suitable for decarbonising the food and beverages industry considering its temperature requirements of <250 °C. Here, we employ a bottom-up approach to investigate the techno-economic feasibility of integrating new HTHP technologies into heat processes of the German food and beverages industry and estimate emissions reduction potentials under waste heat scenarios. Our results indicate that the new HTHP technologies could meet 12 TWh of process heat demand in the German food and beverages industry and cut emissions by 9% considering Germany's current electricity fuel mix. A modest carbon tax of 38 €/t CO2 eq. or higher makes the HTHPs cost-competitive with an optimised fossil fuel-based alternative.@en

The application of environmental strategies requires scoring and evaluation methods that provide an integrated vision of the economic and environmental performance of systems. The vector optimisation, ratio and weighted addition of indicators are the three most prevalent techniques for addressing this need. The vector optimisation evaluates the original indicators independently in a dominance check. No real integration is performed, as the method seeks the optimisation of both indicators at once. This technique reveals win-win situations and can also identify, but not solve, the trade-off situations involved in economy versus ecology. The ratio method establishes a relation among the original indicators. This concept is suitable when one dimension has to be optimised against the other. A number of conceptual problems in the definition of the sense of direction of the ratio method make its interpretation ambiguous. The weighted-addition provides a fair evaluation of the integrated performance of a system, with regard to the decision-maker's preference for ecology and economy. This is crucial to reconcile trade-offs between conflicting criteria. Special attention must be paid to the selection and definition of weighting factors, being a source of potential inconsistencies.@en