COMMENT
Re-thinking how we treat heat: Plugging the costly energy leaks
By Jose La Loggia, group president EMEA, Trane Technologies I
’ve spent three decades in the built environment, from my early days as a young engineer in Australia and La Crosse, Wisconsin, to my current role as Trane Technologies group president across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. In that time, I’ve lived and experienced climates with the full temperature spectrum, from +40°C summer days in Sydney to -30°C winters in Wisconsin. Through those extremes, one thing remains constant: heating and cooling keep our infrastructure running, from our daily living environments to manufacturing and the cold chain.
The real question is how we choose to meet these heating and cooling needs, in a way that is reliable, cost effective and low carbon. One of the most powerful tools we have for decarbonising buildings while saving on energy costs is a technology that may still feel new to some: thermal management systems.
What is a thermal management system?
Traditionally, the industry, and the UK is no different, has treated heating and cooling as two separate silos. One system is for cooling, and another for heating, with excess heat vented out into the atmosphere. This results in the absurdity that exists in many buildings today in which we’re throwing heat away by venting it but then have another machine burning fossil fuel to create more heat. Thermal management systems solve this issue through an integrated approach that manages heating and cooling together, capturing heat that would normally be wasted, and reuse it for comfort heating, hot water or other needs instead of burning new fossil fuels.
What do thermal management systems look like in practice? Depending on the facility’s needs, it may combine heat pumps, high-efficiency chillers, heat recovery units, thermal energy storage or a combination of these tools for maximum efficiency. Paired with intelligent building controls and AI- powered energy optimisation, these systems jointly deliver heating and cooling more efficiently and cost-effectively than ever before.
The ROI of thermal management Many managers don’t realise that their facilities are often heating and cooling at the same time using separate systems, creating hidden flows of wasted energy. This “leakage” of already-paid-for energy becomes an avoidable cost that fuels inefficiency instead of supporting optimal performance. When they learn that a thermal management system can significantly reduce both emissions and operating costs, sometimes the next assumption is that it will be too expensive or difficult to implement.
In reality, thermal management systems can be up to 400 per cent more efficient than traditional systems, cutting down costs and carbon emissions. Full payback of the incremental system cost can often be achieved in just a few years, even before factoring in emissions reductions and sustainability goals. There are no trade-offs.
Lessons from Oss
One of my favourite examples comes from Organon, a global pharmaceutical company whose largest manufacturing site in Oss, the Netherlands, has a complex mix of processes, utilities and office space. It’s an ideal setting for the thermal management system to make a big difference. One major opportunity they found was in their compressed air system. The compressors needed to be cooled, and
that cooling was generating a lot of excess heat that had historically been blown into the air. By introducing two heat pumps, they were able to cool the compressed air more efficiently and feed the captured heat back into their central heating system. The result was a reduced reliance on gas-fired boilers, lower energy use and a big step toward their goal of climate neutrality by 2035, all by rethinking how they managed and reused heat.
Organon is now applying similar thinking in their office buildings, pairing heat pumps with an aquifer thermal energy storage system in the soil to provide heating in winter and cooling in summer. Those steps have created momentum for bigger projects.
The example from Oss sends a simple, yet strong message: the technology is available, and the business case is strong and replicable. When a system can be even four times more efficient than traditional setups, there are few reasons not to make the change.
The challenge, and the opportunity, is to rethink how we treat heat: not as waste to be thrown away, but as a valuable resource that we can recapture, redistribute and reuse. There is technology to do that, it cuts energy costs, reduces emissions and builds more resilient operations on the path to a net-zero future.
FEBRUARY 2026 | ELECTRONICS FOR ENGINEERS
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