Walk through any large industrial facility in the Nordics—a refinery, a chemicals plant, a dairy processing complex—and you will see hundreds of metres of bare pipe radiating heat into spaces where nobody needs it. Steam lines running at 160 °C with degraded insulation. Valves and flanges left uninsulated because nobody measured what they were losing. Process equipment cycling through enormous thermal loads while a meaningful fraction of that energy dissipates before it reaches its destination.
The waste is visible if you carry a thermal camera. It is invisible in most management accounts. Energy costs sit in a general overhead line, rarely broken down by system or process, and almost never benchmarked against what the same facility would consume if its thermal infrastructure were properly maintained. The result is a form of value destruction that is both chronic and entirely addressable—a recurring cost that compounds year after year, hidden in plain sight.
Thermion, one of our companies since 2021, exists to eliminate precisely this kind of waste. They are a technical insulation and energy efficiency specialist operating across Sweden’s industrial base, from petroleum refining and speciality chemicals to food processing and pulp and paper. What they do is not glamorous. It does not involve proprietary algorithms or disruptive platforms. It involves surveying industrial facilities, mapping thermal losses, designing insulation solutions tailored to each environment, and installing them with the precision and durability that heavy industry demands. The results, however, are anything but modest.
The cheapest megawatt is the one you never consume. Industrial insulation is not maintenance. It is a capital-efficient investment with a payback period measured in months, not years—and the returns are permanent.
The Scale of the Problem
Industrial energy consumption in Europe remains one of the largest contributors to both operating cost and carbon emissions. Yet within most industrial facilities, a significant proportion of thermal energy is lost through inadequate or absent insulation on pipes, valves, flanges, vessels, and process equipment. The European Industrial Insulation Foundation has estimated that industrial insulation improvements across the EU could save the equivalent energy output of forty large power plants. The technology to capture these savings has existed for decades. What has been missing, in most cases, is the systematic approach to identifying, prioritising, and executing the work.
The reasons for this gap are structural, not technical. In large corporate groups, energy costs are typically allocated centrally. The divisional management team sees an overhead charge but has neither the granularity to identify where the waste occurs nor the authority to commission improvements. Capital expenditure decisions are made at group level, where thermal insulation competes for attention against more visible investments. Maintenance budgets are consumed by reactive repairs rather than proactive efficiency programmes. And because the savings from insulation are distributed across monthly energy bills rather than arriving as a single visible event, they rarely attract the management attention their cumulative value warrants.
This is one of the reasons carve-outs create such compelling conditions for energy efficiency investment. When a business becomes standalone, its energy costs become its own—visible, attributable, and directly connected to the bottom line. The management team, often for the first time, has both the incentive and the authority to address them. An energy efficiency programme that would have languished in a corporate capital expenditure queue for years can be scoped, approved, and delivering returns within months of the business achieving independence.
What Thermion Actually Does
Thermion is a leading Nordic service and contracting company operating across the energy, industrial, and construction sectors. Headquartered in Örnsköldsvik, Sweden, with offices in fourteen locations from Kiruna in the north to Svedala in the south, the company provides technical insulation, energy efficiency services, sheet metal fabrication, and fire and sound sealing. Their tagline captures the ambition simply: they insulate for a better everyday life and a greener world.
An energy efficiency engagement begins with a comprehensive survey of the facility. Using thermal imaging and engineering analysis, Thermion maps every point of thermal loss across the relevant systems—steam distribution, process heating, cooling circuits, condensate return lines. Each loss point is quantified in energy terms (kilowatt-hours per year), cost terms (against the facility’s actual energy price), and environmental terms (tonnes of CO₂ avoided). The result is not a generic recommendation to improve insulation. It is a site-specific programme with quantified savings for every intervention, ranked by return on investment.
The insulation solutions themselves are engineered for each application. Pipe insulation on a steam line running at 180 °C in a chemicals plant requires different materials, thicknesses, and protective cladding than insulation on a pasteurisation circuit in a dairy. Valves and flanges—the points where pipes connect, where maintenance access is required, and where insulation is most frequently absent or removed and never replaced—require custom-fabricated removable insulation jackets, designed to fit precisely around each component and secured with spring-loaded fastenings that allow rapid removal for inspection and reinstallation afterwards.
This last point matters more than it might appear. In many industrial facilities, the reason valves and flanges are uninsulated is not that nobody thought to insulate them. It is that the insulation was removed during maintenance and never put back, because the original design did not accommodate easy removal and reinstallation. Thermion’s approach—custom-sewn, figure-fitted insulation mattresses with spring-clip fastenings—solves this problem by design. The insulation comes off in seconds for inspection and goes back on in seconds afterwards. The result is that it stays on, which is the only configuration in which it delivers value.
The distinction between installing insulation and maintaining an insulation programme is critical. A one-time installation that degrades over years, or that is removed during maintenance and never replaced, delivers a fraction of its theoretical value. Thermion’s model—survey, design, install, and maintain—ensures the savings persist across the full life of the installation.
Three Projects, Three Industries, One Pattern
The best way to understand what systematic energy efficiency delivers is to look at what it has delivered. Three recent Thermion projects—in chemicals manufacturing, petroleum refining, and food production—illustrate both the range of applications and the consistency of the underlying economics.
Chemicals: Nouryon
At one of Nouryon’s Swedish chemical manufacturing facilities, Thermion conducted a targeted energy efficiency project focused on steam and process piping systems. The survey identified significant heat losses from uninsulated and under-insulated pipes, valves, and process equipment—losses that represented both wasted energy and a workplace safety hazard, as exposed high-temperature surfaces posed burn risks to maintenance and operations personnel.
Thermion designed and installed an insulation programme covering the identified systems. The result was a measurable reduction in energy losses from the steam distribution network and a material improvement in workplace safety. Surface temperatures on previously exposed equipment were brought within safe limits, eliminating burn hazards that the maintenance team had been working around for years.
The project demonstrates a pattern that recurs across industrial energy efficiency work: the primary business case is energy savings, but the secondary benefits—improved safety, reduced maintenance complexity, better working conditions—often prove equally valuable to the facility’s management. Energy efficiency and operational improvement are not separate objectives. They are two outcomes of the same intervention.
Petroleum Refining: ST1, Gothenburg
The ST1 refinery in Gothenburg commissioned Thermion to design, manufacture, and install removable insulation mattresses for a major new process unit. The scale of the project provides a useful benchmark for what industrial insulation work looks like at a large facility: approximately 7,200 valves and flanges required insulation, delivered as over 12,000 individual mattress units, manufactured to precise specifications for each component.
7,200
Valves & flanges
insulated
12,000+
Custom mattress
units delivered
750
Units per week
at peak production
At peak production, Thermion was manufacturing approximately 750 mattress units per week—each one custom-sewn to fit a specific valve or flange configuration, fitted with spring-loaded fastenings for rapid removal and reinstallation during maintenance. The project ran from summer 2023 through to the turn of 2024, integrated into the broader construction schedule for the new process unit.
Refinery environments are among the most demanding applications for insulation. Process temperatures are high, the chemical environment is aggressive, maintenance access requirements are frequent, and safety standards are absolute. The fact that Thermion can deliver at this scale and complexity—thousands of bespoke components, manufactured and installed to refinery-grade specifications, on a construction programme timeline—reflects a level of operational capability that takes years to build.
Food Production: A Major Swedish Dairy
The third project involved one of Sweden’s largest dairy companies, where Thermion was engaged to conduct a comprehensive energy efficiency programme across all production facilities operating steam systems. The scope covered pasteurisation lines, CIP (clean-in-place) systems, cooling circuits, and associated steam distribution infrastructure—the full thermal architecture of a modern dairy processing operation.
The programme began with a facility-by-facility survey to identify and quantify thermal losses, followed by the design and installation of tailored insulation solutions for each environment. The results were substantial and precisely quantified.
2,890
MWh saved
per year
128
Tonnes CO₂
avoided annually
89%
Energy reduction
on improved sections
Annual energy savings of 2,890 MWh—equivalent to the annual energy consumption of approximately 300 Swedish households. Annual CO₂ reduction of 128 tonnes. On the sections where insulation was improved, energy losses were reduced by up to 89 per cent. These are not modelled projections. They are measured outcomes from a completed programme.
2,890 megawatt-hours saved. 128 tonnes of CO₂ avoided. Every year, permanently. The equivalent of taking the annual energy consumption of 300 homes and simply not using it—by insulating the pipes that were already there.
The Economics of Not Wasting Energy
What makes industrial energy efficiency unusual as an investment is the combination of low risk, short payback, and permanent benefit. A typical insulation programme at an industrial facility delivers full payback within six to eighteen months, depending on energy prices and the severity of the existing thermal losses. After payback, the savings recur every year for the life of the installation—typically fifteen to twenty-five years with proper maintenance.
Compare this to most capital investments available to an industrial business. A production capacity expansion might deliver returns over five to seven years, carries execution risk, and depends on market demand materialising as forecast. A technology platform migration might improve efficiency over three to five years but carries significant implementation risk and change management cost. An energy efficiency programme based on technical insulation carries virtually no execution risk—the physics are well understood, the materials are proven, and the installation techniques are mature. The only variable is the precision of the initial survey, which determines whether the programme captures 80 per cent or 95 per cent of the available savings.
For the management team of a recently carved-out business, this risk-return profile is particularly attractive. In the first twelve to eighteen months of standalone operation, when the business is simultaneously building its own IT systems, establishing standalone finance, completing the management team, and launching its value creation programme, an energy efficiency project delivers measurable EBITDA improvement without adding complexity. It does not require new systems, new processes, or new capabilities. It requires a survey, an installation programme, and a maintenance schedule. The improvement flows directly to the bottom line from the month the work is completed.
Energy Efficiency as a Value Creation Lever
Within our value creation framework, energy efficiency sits at the intersection of two levers: cost efficiency and multiple expansion. The direct EBITDA improvement from reduced energy consumption is a cost efficiency gain—recurring, low-risk, and measurable from the first full reporting period after completion. The sustainability credentials that a documented energy efficiency programme provides contribute to exit positioning: a business that can demonstrate a structured approach to carbon reduction, with quantified outcomes, is more attractive to acquirers who are themselves subject to ESG reporting requirements and decarbonisation commitments.
There is a third dimension that is harder to quantify but no less real. Energy efficiency work, when conducted systematically, produces a level of operational understanding that extends well beyond the insulation programme itself. The thermal survey maps every system in the facility. The engineering analysis identifies not only insulation gaps but also process inefficiencies, maintenance issues, and infrastructure risks that would otherwise go unnoticed. The programme creates a baseline against which future improvements can be measured. In several cases, the insights from an energy efficiency survey have led directly to broader operational improvement initiatives that were not part of the original scope.
Energy efficiency is the rare investment that improves the business on three dimensions simultaneously: it reduces costs, strengthens the sustainability profile, and generates operational intelligence. The payback period is measured in months. The benefits persist for decades. And the execution risk is as close to zero as any industrial investment gets.
Why This Capability Matters
Thermion’s position within the Mimir portfolio is not incidental. We acquired the business from Norisol in 2021 because we recognised that technical insulation and energy efficiency services represent a structural growth opportunity driven by forces that are not cyclical: rising energy costs, tightening carbon regulations, and increasing corporate commitment to measurable decarbonisation. The demand for these services will grow for decades, across every industrial sector, in every geography where energy costs are material to operating economics.
Since becoming a standalone company, Thermion has invested in expanding its energy efficiency capabilities, growing its geographic coverage across Sweden with fourteen offices from Kiruna to Svedala, and building the engineering and project management capacity to deliver at the scale the ST1 refinery project demonstrates. The business is doing what well-built carve-outs do: taking a strong operational foundation and building on it with the focus, investment, and commercial ambition that independent ownership enables.
The industrial facilities that Thermion serves will continue to consume enormous quantities of thermal energy. The question is not whether they will invest in efficiency—the regulatory and economic pressures make that inevitable. The question is whether they will do it systematically, with the engineering precision and operational discipline that turns a theoretical saving into a measured, permanent reduction in both cost and carbon. That is what Thermion delivers. And it is, in the most literal sense, the cheapest megawatt available.
The greenest energy is the energy you never use. In an era of rising costs and tightening regulation, systematic industrial energy efficiency is not an option. It is an economic and environmental imperative—and the returns are there for any business willing to measure what it wastes.