Prof. Karl holds the Chair of Energy Process Engineering at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg’s EnergyCampus Nuremberg (EnCN) since 2011 and works intensively on the combustion and gasification of solid fuels, the synthesis of energy sources from renewable energies, storage technologies and the economic evaluation of new energy technologies. In 2007, he founded the start-up company agnion Inc. with investors from California and Munich, which was rated as one of the 30 most promising greentech start-ups in Germany by Wirtschaftswoche and strategy consultants Roland Berger in early 2012.
The defossilization of energy-intensive industrial processes is one of the unresolved tasks of the energy transition. In the chemical, glass, lime, cement and steel industries in particular, huge quantities of fossil fuels such as gas and coal will continue to be used worldwide for the time being to provide process temperatures around or above 800°C. While heat pumps are gaining increasing acceptance for the provision of process heat in lower temperature ranges, solutions for the use of volatile electricity from wind and PV are not yet foreseeable. The contribution will present the options for electrical heating of high-temperature processes using the example of steam reforming and calcination in the cement industry and will discuss the technical implementation and economic potentials.