Optimized Energy-Flexible Operation Strategies of Air Conditioning Systems in Production Environments

Abstract

Rising energy prices and regulatory requirements are forcing both large manufacturing companies and small and medium-sized enterprises to minimize costs and emissions associated with energy supply. To operate the considered systems more efficiently overall, numerous energy efficiency measures have already been successfully implemented in recent years. This is particularly the case for the cross-industry air conditioning systems that are the focus of this paper. However, due to the growing share of renewable energies and the resulting fluctuating electricity prices and CO2 emissions factors, energy flexibility measures are becoming increasingly relevant. In this context, flexibility measures allow industrial system operators to benefit from these fluctuations, primarily using energy storages and optimized operation strategies. However, the implementation of energy flexibility measures requires high data availability, a good understanding of the system, and flexibility in production planning. To be able to effectively use the existing energy flexibility potentials, air conditioning systems are examined, that contain widely used cross-section technologies. In this paper, a method to enable optimized energy-flexible operation of industrial air conditioning systems is presented. A common feature of manufacturing sites is a similar topology of the thermal supply infrastructure across industries. The complex overall system is divided into several subsystems, e.g., cooling supply system, ventilation system and the production hall. Production processes typically release waste heat into the indoor air of the production hall, which then must be cooled. By accounting for thermal and electrical output and optimizing the operation strategy using mathematical optimization, both operating costs and CO2 emissions associated with energy provision can be significantly reduced. The presented use case reveals that operational cost savings of up to 18 % and a reduction of CO2 emission associated with energy supply of up to 16 % can be realized by optimizing the cooling supply system on its own.