The department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) is providing up to £18m of grant funding through a competitive process to support the uptake of industrial heat recovery projects.
BEIS has developed the Industrial Heat Recovery Support (IHRS) Programme to further understand the identified challenges and barriers to adoption and to increase industrial confidence in deploying heat recovery technologies by working with industry to address these barriers.
The IHRS Programme is a competitive grant funding programme in 2 phases, which aims to:

• increase industry confidence to invest in technologies to recover heat from industrial processes
• increase the deployment of such technologies in England and Wales

Industrial heat recovery is a process by which heat generated in or for an industrial process that otherwise would be wasted is recovered and used.  This waste heat can be used in a number of ways, including within the same facility for heat or cooling, by another end user (e.g. via a new or existing heat network), or by converting the waste heat to power.  Heat from all waste streams (solid, liquid and gas) are included in this definition.
Industrial heat recovery has the potential to realise significant energy bill and carbon savings for industry through a reduction in primary fuel use.  It therefore contributes to the government’s aims of achieving a low cost, clean and secure energy system and can also provide competitiveness and productivity gains, giving it strong links with the Industrial Strategy.
A study by Element Energy found that 11 TWh/year of industrial heat used in 2014 could have been technically recovered from industrial processes in eight key energy intensive sectors, but that only 5 TWh/year of this would have been commercially viable.  This illustrates that the deployment of industrial heat recovery is falling well short of its potential at present.  This is due to a number of technical barriers including insufficient knowledge and information, complexity of fitting heat recovery technologies to certain industrial processes and commercial barriers regarding the payback of investments and availability of capital.
Eligible proposals that are well aligned with the aims and objectives of the IHRS Programme will be able to apply for grants to partially fund the proposed project from concept through to delivery.
To find out more about the competition, click here.