Abstract
The recovery of waste heat from the manufacturing industry for building heating and cooling has a high decarbonization potential. Flexibility measures such as demand response can further enhance energy savings. However, there is a lack of case studies on the utilization of production-related excess heat for building energy supply. Both waste heat availability and production-related internal gains as demand response signals remain unexplored. We present an analysis framework for three scenario types for on-site and off-site industrial excess heat utilization: (I) on-site waste heat demand response for building heating, (II) on-site production-related internal gains demand response, and (III) waste heat utilization for district heating. For (I) and (II), load shifting and peak shaving are compared using EnergyPlus Ideal Loads-based simulations. At the district scale (III), the demand of buildings surrounding the production facility is determined through archetype-based energy simulations. The framework was applied to two industrial use cases - one in Spain and one in Norway. Results show that on-site thermal energy storage provides the highest reduction potential under the idealized modeling assumptions: auxiliary heating demand reductions reach up to 98.65 % in the Spanish case and up to 9.02 % in the Norwegian case. At the district scale, targeting building subgroups enables technically feasible waste heat utilization, with adjacent educational buildings in Spain achieving 15.13 % demand coverage and residential buildings in Norway reaching 3.84 %. The proposed framework demonstrates the potential of waste heat utilization across facility and district scales, offering industrial plants a systematic approach to assess the potential reduction in building energy demand. Copyright © 2026. Published by Elsevier B.V.