Demand Response In The Engineering Industry

Abstract: The power utilities in Sweden are planning to replace the major part of thenuclear power plants with renewable energy resource by the year 2030. Some ofthe renewable energy resources are intermittent, which may endanger the powersystem stability. A solution to this problem could be increased exibility in theend-users consumption, which is known as demand response. This is a usefultool that can be used to facilitate the large integration of renewable energyresource into the power grid. Therefore, several of the Swedish governmentauthorities have stated that the possibilities for demand response should befurther investigated.During this thesis, a case study is carried out at Volvo Group Truck OperationsPowertrain Productions in Koping, with the purpose of deriving theirtechnical possibilities for DR in the factory. Volvo in Koping mainly producesgearboxes to all trucks within the Volvo Group concern and belongs to the engineeringindustry sector. The engineering industry has previously not beeninvestigated for DR purposes in Sweden. The main goal of the thesis is to derivethe DR capacity of the factory and the associated time parameters. Onlydemand response by shifting the production in time is considered.One production group (Midiblock 2) in the factory is modelled using MixedInteger Linear Programming and the optimization problem is used to minimizethe electricity cost while fullling the production requirements. The optimizationproblem is done on daily basis and the result is binary operating pointsfor CNC-machines. The output from the Mixed Integer Linear Programmingproblem is sent to a discrete event model, which is used to validate the resultsand display the optimal energy consumption.The simulation results indicates that the modelled production group can performa load shift of 270 kWh/h during 4 hours by scheduling production. Duringthe reduction it should be possible to perform actions such as maintenance andchanging settings of machines. If the results are true for the entire factory, theresulting load reduction is 1.35 MWh/h during 4 hours. However, the nancialincentives to perform load reductions are low. Also, Volvo in Koping does nothave any routines to shut-o the CNC-machines and an extensive work is requiredto make a load reduction possible. Resulting in that DR at the factory isat the moment unrealistic. In addition to the possibilities for DR, the possibleeconomic savings by shutting o the CNC-machines when they are not producingunits are also approximated. Volvo in Koping can save a large amount ofenergy and yearly cut the cost by at least 5 000 000 SEK on these actions, whichis also the rst step towards enabling DR in the factory.