ENERGYMASTER

Santer Reply, GridDuck, Diversey, TEC Eurolab and Metal Office propose creating an operating system for adapting factory production processes and other energy use to rooftop solar energy generation. The 2 million manufacturers in Europe employ 29 million people, contribute nearly 20% to the EU gross value added and consume 26% of EU energy, just after transport and households. Energy costs have been high for a number of years now, and are unlikely to fall fast. So self-sufficiency is becoming more interesting for manufacturers, with rooftop solar PV being the obvious choice. Factories put enough solar on their roof to cover all or most of their operations, and then add batteries or grid-supplied power to balance out intermittency, and to avoid feeding electricity back to the grid (as feed-in tariffs are being taken away).

This project looks at the problem in a different way: can we increase self-consumption of solar energy by adjusting demand to solar generation? The aim is to use finely grained real-time energy measurements for each machine or process. This data is then used to create AI prediction models of production, which can then be compared with solar generation forecasts. This in turn enables factory managers to plan and control their production, or to let some of their production processes run automatically as and when there is solar. The benefit of increasing self-consumption from 50% to 65% would be €10,500 per factory in 2029, across Europe €3.9bn per year.