Australia’s clean energy blind spot: industrial heat

Australia has made bold commitments to meet net-zero emissions – a necessary step amid intensifying global climate pressure, shifting policy frameworks, and investor scrutiny. But while our national clean energy conversations tend to orbit around solar panels, wind turbines and electric vehicles, a critical part of the energy puzzle remains unexplored: how we actually use power.

August 11, 2025 Erich Kisi

Image: MGA Thermal

While generation dominates strategy and headlines, it’s consumption – particularly in heavy industry – that presents some of the most complex decarbonisation challenges. The truth is, a massive slice of Australia’s energy use isn’t going into homes or cars – it’s going into heat. From firing bricks to sterilising food and manufacturing cement, thermal energy underpins the most essential and emissions-intensive industries. Today, industrial energy demand accounts for 42% of Australia’s total final energy consumption, of which half is used for process heating.

The infrastructure mismatch: where our energy really goes

Despite its scale, industrial heat has been in the shadows of Australia’s development of clean energy solutions. This is largely due to the fundamental mismatch between the thermal requirements of heavy industry and the limitations of available clean energy technologies.

Renewables like wind and solar are essential pillars of a decarbonised grid, but their variable output cannot meet the round-the-clock, high-temperature demands of heavy industry. When generation dips, manufacturers are forced to revert to fossil fuels to maintain operations. Battery storage, while critical for electrical grid stability and short-duration power balancing, is fundamentally limited by its discharge duration, round-trip efficiency, and cost per kWh of thermal output when repurposed for heat. Such constraints make it an ill fit for applications requiring continuous, high-temperature heat over extended periods.

The misalignment has left a significant emissions source under-addressed, and one that must be considered if Australia is to meet its long-term climate goals.

The missing piece: ETES

The good news? A scalable and proven solution already exists. Electro-thermal energy storage (ETES) provides a technically viable way to decarbonise industrial heat. These systems convert surplus renewable electricity into stored thermal energy, which can later be released as dispatchable, high-grade heat, regardless of weather or time of day.

MGA Thermal’s demonstration unit stores 5 MWh of energy with a 500 kW thermal dispatch power.
*Image: MGA Thermal*

Commercial-scale demonstrations, including pilot systems operating in Australia, have proven the feasibility of ETES in delivering continuous, emissions-free heat at industrial scale. MGA Thermal’s 5 MWh demonstration unit uses phase-change blocks that store energy as latent heat and releases the energy as high-temperature steam. Engineered to have a compact footprint and to be readily scalable, it integrates with existing infrastructure, showing how ETES can be deployed without costly overhauls or extended operational downtime.

It’s just one illustration of how ETES can bridge the gap between variable clean energy generation and the continuous heat demands of industry, unlocking new opportunities to power industrial processes with clean energy.

Integrating ETES into Australia’s decarbonisation toolkit

If Australia is to meet its net-zero targets, we must broaden our focus to include industrial use. Solutions like ETES don’t require a wholesale reinvention of industrial operations but give us a way to decarbonise legacy infrastructure and build future-ready systems in parallel.

With the right policy signals, industry-government collaboration, and targeted investment, ETES could help decarbonise some of our most emission-intensive sectors while also supporting energy resilience, job retention, and competitiveness in a world increasingly aligned with low-carbon production standards.

The path to net zero doesn’t end with clean generation. To get there, we need to address how energy is used across the economy, particularly in sectors that can’t afford to be left behind. By embracing technologies like ETES, we can address one of the energy transition’s blind spots and ensure that Australia’s industrial sector remains strong, sustainable and globally competitive.

Author: Erich Kisi, Executive Chair and Co-Founder of MGA Thermal

The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own, and do not necessarily reflect those held by pv magazine.

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