Optimal energy distribution in industrial Spinnerei block

Challenge / Goal

The continuously increasing prevalence of variable renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar, along with an increasingly intricate consumption spectrum, such as smart home appliances or e-mobility, are making the management of modern building networks ever more complex. At the same time, highly granular control of volatile energy flows holds great efficiency potential and thus the potential to reduce emissions by using renewable energies more flexibly and storing them more effectively. The increasing spread of time-of-day and weather-dependent energy generators such as PV systems makes it necessary to control energy flows flexibly in real time to ensure grid stability. This is because if the amount of energy contained in a grid varies too much, it can lead to grid disruptions or even a total blackout. At the same time, e-mobility, smart home applications and growing awareness of energy consumption are also increasing the demands of end consumers. Software-supported load and energy management is therefore becoming increasingly important for energy suppliers. At the same time, it is an opportunity to expand business activities in the area of energy services. As one of many use cases, an electric car can be preferentially recharged with solar power while parked and the solar power can be redirected to a storage unit immediately after the process of recharging is completed. This type of control, however, is extremely intricate and not feasible on a larger scale without the use of special software. Furthermore, the digital data acquisition required for this opens up the possibility of making the highly granular consumption data available to end users.

The biggest challenge for this technological approach is that energy grids cannot be generalized. Each grid must therefore be analyzed and classified from the ground up in order to derive useful use cases. This involves not only the fundamental relationships between generation and consumption (where, when and how flexibly energy is generated and consumed in the grid) but also technical details such as the communication interfaces of digitized measuring devices. In the absence of widespread standards, it can sometimes be very complex to integrate certain components into the grid. In addition, producers and consumers must be prioritized. For example, it may not be possible to simply switch off certain electrical generators such as a combined heat and power plant to ensure grid stability because they are integrated into the heat supply as a priority. On the other hand, certain commercial consumers cannot simply consume less energy because they are dependent on a supply at a certain power level.