Enabling decentralized demand side management in industrial energy supply systems

Abstract

Due to the increasing share of fluctuating renewable energy resources in the energy supply, the supply-demand balance needs to be increasingly supported by prosumers, who are able to adapt their energy demand and production depending on the current supply. Since small and medium-sized companies are expected to yield the potential for providing a significant share of the required flexibility, we propose an approach that enables an efficient development, testing and implementation of advanced control strategies and further data applications in decentralized energy supply systems of medium-sized companies to support the integration of such technologies and the increase of prosumer-side flexibility. The approach is based on an adaptable control framework, which is at first applied to a physical simulation model of the industrial energy system to test and train new control strategies and can afterwards be moved to the actual energy supply system of the plant.