Towards energy flexible and energy self-sufficient manufacturing systems

In order to respond to environmental requirements, a growing number of manufacturing companies operate on-site renewable energy generation as part of their own energy supply. As a vision, plants could be fully energy self-sufficient and independent from electricity suppliers. From perspective of manufacturing systems, this requires the ability to flexibly adapt the energy demand of production machines and processes to current electricity generation and availability from grid. Such energy flexible manufacturing systems can achieve different development levels of energy flexibility: energy demand flexibility, balanced energy self-sufficiency and real energy self-sufficiency. Within this work, scenario-based simulations are used to assess strategies towards energy self-sufficiency for the case of a manufacturing system in a learning factory environment. Several aspects regarding dimensioning of on-site renewable energy generation and resulting over supply, productivity and demand side management are addressed to show occurring tradeoffs related with energy self-sufficiency. The study shows, that a coupling of demand side management and storage technologies is the most promising combination to achieve a high degree of energy self-sufficiency (98%) for the regarded manufacturing system.