Due to the globally, rapid, continuous increase of electricity prices in recent years, cogeneration is becoming an easily accessible technology to increase energy efficiency in production plants, whose time of simple payback time is increasingly favourable. Furthermore, in Poland, besides economic savings, this solution has a significant impact on CO2 reduction due to high-emission factor (coal focused production) of generated electricity. Reducing CO2 emission and increasing energy efficiency mirrors into a reduction of production costs incurred, which makes the production plant investing in such a solution more competitive on the market. Unfortunately, the company is not always able to utilize the full heat appeared as a by-product when generating electricity in a cogenerator. For this reason, the combination of cogeneration with ORC becomes a promising way to fully utilize waste heat from a cogenerator. In this article, a technical and economic analysis of various cogeneration and ORC variants was carried out in an industrial plant producing fasteners for the automotive industry. The analysis also covers the combined variant of cogeneration with ORC. The analysis shows that because of continuous increase of electricity prices, cogeneration becomes an economically justified investment in contrast to the ORC engine, which is characterized by high investment costs and low efficiency, while in combination with cogeneration it may become more affordable for industrial plants with energy-intensive processes such as heat treatment.