The expansion of renewable energies and the concomitant compensatory measures, such as the expansion of the electricity grid, the installation of energy storage facilities, or the flexibilization of demand, lead to a more elaborated energy supply system. Furthermore, the technological development of small power plants has further progressed, and many novel technologies have achieved grid parity. For manufacturing companies, the integration of renewable generation plants at their own site therefore represents a promising strategy for being both technically independent of the electricity grid and autonomous of price policy decisions and volatile market prices. This paper outlines the existing decentralized, renewable power generation technologies, their energetic modeling, and a hybrid optimization methodology for their dimensioning that uses mixed integer linear programming (MILP) and linear programming (LP) problem formulation. Finally, the introduced dimensioning method is applied to an exemplary manufacturing company that is assumed to be in the central part of Germany and located in the metalworking sector. The company has an electricity demand of approximately 20,000 MWh/a. The optimization results in a maximum expansion of PV and the use of CHP to cover the base load leading to a promising energy cost reduction of almost 20%.
The amount of renewable energy is increasing in the German energy system. As a result, grid expansion, consumer regulation (demand response), innovative storage solutions or intelligent grid operation are measures to avoid system instabilities. The development of energy prices and regulatory charges is difficult to predict against this dynamic background. The technological development of small power plants is in progress and many of the offered technologies are reaching grid parity. To increase independency from the grid and to avoid grid supply in periods of high prices, the integration of decentral, renewable power generation technologies is a reasonable solution for manufacturing companies. Therefore, a procedure for industrial companies to use their self-produced energy in a sustainable manner is introduced. This paper focuses on the characterization of industrial energy consumers, which is one of the first steps in the procedure. Different consumer criteria are descripted to define 48 consumer groups. Certain factories include consumers that can be described by a multitude of these consumer groups.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.