IMEC has about 6 office buildings of various ages on its campus, mostly with their own local conventional heat and cold production plant. Ingenium investigated how these existing buildings and some newly planned buildings on IMEC's Heverlee campus could be made as fossil-free as possible.

Various scenarios were calculated such as biomass heating, heating with heat pumps based on own waste heat flows from the clean rooms (FABs), heating and cooling based on geothermal energy... Always in combination with structural renovation if possible and necessary. For these measures, various schematic layouts were calculated each time (highly centralized heat and cold production with a heat and/or cold network, decentralized heat and cold production, decentralized heat and cold production with source network and various hybrid forms).

These scenarios were all calculated energetically, ecologically and financially. For the scenarios, based on waste heat, a thorough analysis of the energy flows of the FAB plants was carried out and energy optimizations were indicated where possible, with a focus on reducing natural gas consumption. Finally, based on the developed concepts, a concrete short- and medium-term roadmap was set up to implement this sustainability improvement, taking into account the phasing of planned renovations and new construction projects.