A Note on Industrial Waste Heat Recovery Potential
The bars show remaining technical potential (MWₑ) by industry—that’s the amount of electricity that could be made from existing waste-heat streams with known technologies, nationwide. Totals (rounded) for the top sectors:
- Petroleum & Coal Products (NAICS 324): 6,698 MW
- Chemical Manufacturing (NAICS 325): 1,806 MW
- Primary Metals (NAICS 331): 1,796 MW
- Nonmetallic Mineral Products — cement, glass, lime — (NAICS 327): 1,479 MW
- Food Manufacturing (NAICS 311): ~1,000 MW
- Fabricated Metal Products (NAICS 332): 879 MW
- Paper (NAICS 322): 737 MW
- Wood Products (NAICS 321): 429 MW
Summed across manufacturing, this top-down assessment finds ~14.6 GW of waste heat power (WHP) potential (≈14,594 MW)—gigawatt-scale power currently lost as heat.
Context: The Department of Energy estimates that ~20–50% of industrial process energy is lost as waste heat, so the charted MW values represent the slice of that loss that could be converted to electricity with today’s technology.
