Waste heat for drying, water and food: Correlation
Prices it moves with, and why
Low-grade heat is usually free at its source; the cost lies in pipes, exchangers, dryers and chillers. Its value equals the fuel or power it saves, mostly natural gas or electricity, so it pays best when those prices are high.
No public price Waste heat for drying, water and food has no public monthly price series: Built into plants and greenhouses; low-grade heat has no traded price.What its price moves with
Drying, greenhouse heating and thermal desalination would otherwise burn gas, so the gas price sets what waste heat is worth. Dear gas makes projects pay, cheap gas leaves heat unused. This use has no price series, so no statistics are shown.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.Exchangers move heat from exhaust, cooling water or flue gas into dryers, greenhouses and desalination units. Their cost is most of the investment, so steel and fabrication prices decide whether low-grade heat is worth capturing.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.Multi-effect and flash desalination plants, common in the Gulf, use waste heat from power plants to boil seawater. Using free heat cuts the cost of fresh water compared with burning fuel.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.Harvested grain often needs drying before storage, usually with gas or diesel burners. Waste heat from nearby plants can replace that fuel, lowering one of the energy costs of grain handling.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.Carbon capture plants use amine solvents that must be heated to release captured carbon dioxide, a large energy need. Supplying that heat from waste streams cuts the cost of capture, linking it to amine demand.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.When waste heat is too cool for a use, industrial heat pumps can raise its temperature using electricity. They compete with and complement direct uses, widening how much low-grade heat can be put to work.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.How to read these numbers
Correlation of monthly changes (the number in the coloured pill) compares how much each price moved, month by month, since 2006 or the first month both series exist. It runs from −1 to +1: near +1 the two usually rise and fall in the same months, near 0 there is no link, and a negative number means they tend to move in opposite directions. Above 0.7 is strong, 0.4 to 0.7 moderate, 0.2 to 0.4 weak.
12-month changes compare year-on-year moves, which shows whether two prices share the same cycles even when the month-to-month noise differs.
Price function is a straight-line fit of the two prices on logarithmic scales: price ≈ k × (partner price)β. β is how much this price moves, in per cent, for a 1% move in the partner over the whole period, and R² is the share of the variation the fit explains. Two prices that both drift up with inflation can fit well without any real link, so read it together with the monthly correlation.
Lead or lag checks whether the monthly correlation is clearly higher when one price is shifted by 1 to 6 months.
Correlation is not cause. The reasons on each card explain the economic link; the numbers show how strongly it has shown up in prices. Proxy series are US producer price indexes or related prices and can blur the real link.
Data: World Bank Commodity Price Data (Pink Sheet), October 2026; US Bureau of Labor Statistics producer price indexes, IMF primary commodity prices and US EIA prices via FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, retrieved November 2026. Calculations by this site.