Optimal design of a local renewable electricity supply system for power-intensive production processes with demand response

Abstract

This work studies synergies arising from combining industrial demand response and local renewable electricity supply. To this end, we optimize the design of a local electricity generation and storage system with an integrated demand response scheduling of a continuous power-intensive production process in a multi-stage problem. We optimize both total annualized cost and global warming impact and consider local photovoltaic and wind electricity generation, an electric battery, and electricity trading on day-ahead and intraday market. We find that installing a battery can reduce emissions and enable large trading volumes on the electricity markets, but significantly increases cost. Economically and ecologically-optimal operation of the process and battery are driven primarily by the electricity price and grid emission factor, respectively, rather than locally generated electricity. A parameter study reveals that cost savings from the local system and flexibilizing the process behave almost additively.