Industry Report

Electrifying Industry Is a Competitiveness Play, Not Just a Sustainability One

A new report from the Renewable Thermal Collaborative and the Industrial Heat Pump Alliance puts real numbers behind industrial electrification. AtmosZero CEO Addison Stark joined the report’s launch webinar to talk about what it will actually take to turn that opportunity into installed steam capacity.

Powering American Industry: The Economic Opportunity of Industrial Electrification, produced by Greenline Insights for the Renewable Thermal Collaborative (RTC) and the Industrial Heat Pump Alliance, models what happens if the U.S. scales electrified industrial heat over the next decade. The findings move the conversation for manufacturers away from a narrow sustainability topic and into where it actually belongs: manufacturing capacity, jobs, and national competitiveness.

What the report found

Over the next ten years, scaling industrial electrification could support:

• $254 billion in investment across deployment and manufacturing
• $471 billion in total economic output
• $185 billion in GDP growth
• 1.66 million jobs

The report also estimates that every dollar invested generates roughly $1.85 in broader economic activity, a reflection of how deeply electrification touches the domestic supply chain — from component manufacturing to installation to ongoing service. Ten states were flagged as especially well positioned to capture this opportunity: California, Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas.

The benefits aren’t automatic

Speaking on the report’s launch panel, Addison put a caveat on the headline numbers. As the CEO of a company scaling a new electrification technology day to day, he was clear that hundreds of billions in projected economic activity depend on real conditions falling into place.

“They’ll really only materialize if companies can actually build the equipment, customers can actually deploy it, and utilities and policymakers create the conditions for projects to actually pencil.”

In other words: the opportunity is real, but it depends on rate design, financing, workforce, and supply chain decisions lining up with the technology — not on the technology alone.

AtmosZero’s focus: a product, not a project

At AtmosZero, that means treating steam electrification as a repeatable product category instead of a series of bespoke engineering projects. Addison described the company’s approach as a complete focus on minimizing total cost of ownership — not just operating costs, but capital costs too — so that electrification pencils for manufacturers running commodity products, not just premium ones.

That focus on repeatability matters because of where most industrial thermal load actually sits: Addison noted that 65% of manufacturing facilities carry a thermal load below 10 megawatts, meaning the industry needs smaller, factory-built building blocks rather than one-off custom systems. The goal, as he put it, is one SKU for a boiler that becomes the standard across multi-facility manufacturers — giving industrial customers a bankable supply chain and a service model they can trust, rather than a bespoke retrofit every time.

Steam stays the backbone

Steam remains the core thermal backbone for many industrial sectors, which is why AtmosZero’s low-temperature, low-to-medium range focus works as a bridge toward broader industrial electrification. Addison also connected this directly to the current moment in electricity demand: with AI and data centers driving rapid load growth, he argued industrial electrification shouldn’t be framed as simply adding more demand to the grid. Using electricity efficiently to produce steam — rather than through resistive elements alone — helps preserve electrical capacity for data centers, advanced manufacturing, and other strategic users at the same time.

He also pointed to rate design as a make-or-break factor for smaller manufacturers: while large industrial facilities can benefit from time-of-day pricing and flexibility programs, most distributed light-industry facilities are price takers without the energy teams to manage variable rates. For that segment, simpler and more predictable rate structures — paired with clear line of sight on total cost of ownership — are what actually move capital budgets.

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