The European Commission has made a firm commitment to a climate-neutral Europe by 2050. To achieve this target, the European Green Deal contains a series of measures and policies that will be key to the construction of a modern economy that is efficient in the use of resources, and also competitive. This Deal endorses and speeds up the process of modernisation and transformation of the economy that the European Union began a few years back.

In 2005, the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU-ETS) was approved and implemented. It enabled plants covered by the scheme to reduce their emissions by around 35% between 2009 and 2019. The legislative framework was reviewed in 2018 to speed up emission reductions and accelerate the need of the industrial and energy sectors to apply  measures and investments to deploy innovative technologies that could minimise their carbon footprint.

Due to the fact that the requirements in emission reductions are increasingly demanding, the price of CO₂ emission rights has increased over the last 18 months, from €35 per tonne of CO₂ to almost €60. In this context, industry needs to implement an ambitious decarbonization strategy for its production processes that will allow it to adapt, not only to the climate targets pursued by Europe, but also to the challenges posed by the global market.

The construction of a carbon-free economy poses major technological challenges in a number of processes and sectors. Heat generation processes for industry represent almost 20% of global energy consumption, with an impact in terms of CO₂ emissions. Heat represents almost 75% of the energy demand of industry, which is covered by fossil fuels to 90%. Industries or industrial processes that use heat at medium temperature, such as construction, the food sector, textiles and manufacturing, could reduce their emissions by 90% through electrification based on clean energy sources. Their energy consumption profile makes them ideal for testing Renewable Power-to-X solutions that could be scalable to other kinds of applications.

ACCIONA is launching this challenge to identify Renewable Power-to-X solutions that help our industrial clients using heat at medium temperature to reduce their carbon footprint through the application of alternative technologies to generate heat without CO₂ emissions. Proposed solutions that have the potential to facilitate the re-use of residual heat will be considered positively.

The developers of the proposals can either present a comprehensive solution or technologies that, thanks to their hybridization with others, comply with the objective pursued by ACCIONA. If a comprehensive solution is not presented, the proposal should indicate other technological needs required to create the solution.