IMPRO (Industrial Heat Demand Profile Generator) is an Excel‑based tool for generating multi‑temperature, hourly industrial heat load profiles. It enables energy system modelers and researchers to:
- Capture sector‑specific seasonal and diurnal variations in process heat demand
- Disaggregate total heat demand across customizable temperature levels (e.g., low‑temperature hot water to high‑temperature steam)
- Estimate excess heat availability for heat recovery and sector‑coupling analyses
- Quickly use built‑in presets for seven major industry sectors or create fully custom profiles
- Cluster Blend: Represents seasonal variations by combining multiple outdoor temperature‑sensitivity clusters.
- Temperature Level Distributions: Splits total demand into user‑defined temperature levels to reflect different process heat requirements.
- Hourly Resolution: Applies standardized shift‑based load profiles to convert daily demand into realistic hourly curves.
- Standard Presets: Includes ready‑to‑use profiles for seven sectors—Iron & Steel, Basic Chemicals, Non‑Metallic Minerals, Pulp & Paper, Food & Beverages & Tobacco, Machinery & Transport, and Non‑Ferrous Metals—so you can generate a profile with just an outdoor temperature time series and annual demand.
- Excess Heat Module: Allows specification of a fixed fraction of heat demand as recoverable excess heat at lower temperature levels.
- Download the latest release from this repository.
- Open
IMPRO.xlsxin Microsoft Excel (version 2016 or later). - Select a preset industry sector or choose “Custom” to define your own cluster blend, temperature distribution, and shift profiles.
- Import an hourly outdoor temperature time series or choose one of the included profiles.
- Scale the normalized output to match your desired annual heat demand.
- Export the generated daily or hourly profiles (and excess heat series) for use in energy system models.
For detailed usage instructions and examples, refer to the Information worksheet included in the Excel file.
(Holmes, T., Kauko, H., & Backe, S. (2025). IMPRO – An Industrial Heat Demand Profile Tool: Multi‑Temperature Load Profile Generation for Industrial Heat Demand Modelling. MethodsX. 🔗 [View the full article (Elsevier)](ENTER LINK HERE))
This project is released under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for details.
IMPRO builds on:
- Mateo Jesper, Felix Pag, Klaus Vajen, Ulrike Jordan,Annual Industrial and Commercial Heat Load Profiles: Modeling Based on k-Means Clustering and Regression Analysis, Energy Conversion and Management: X, Volume 10, 2021, 100085, ISSN 2590-1745, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecmx.2021.100085.
- Rehfeldt, M., Fleiter, T. & Toro, F. A bottom-up estimation of the heating and cooling demand in European industry. Energy Efficiency 11, 1057–1082 (2018), https://doi.org/10.1007/s12053-017-9571-y
- Fabian Bühler, Stefan Petrović, Fridolin Müller Holm, Kenneth Karlsson, Brian Elmegaard, Spatiotemporal and economic analysis of industrial excess heat as a resource for district heating, Energy, Volume 151, 2018, Pages 715-728, ISSN 0360-5442, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.energy.2018.03.059