Assessing the potential of combined production and energy management in Industrial Energy Hubs – Analysis of a chipboard production plant

Highlights: • Development of a generic optimization framework for process industry. • Analysis of a real-world use case based on process data. • Sole optimization of the energy system does not reduce energy consumption. • Combined energy and production scheduling reduces production energy by 30%. • Excess heat must be utilized to exploit the full optimization potential. To minimize energy consumption in today's industry, holistic energy efficiency solutions are required. The Energy Hub is a promising concept for optimal energy management of industrial systems with multiple energy carriers like electricity, heat, or gas. However, most of the research conducted in this field focuses on optimal energy management and does not consider the scheduling of product in manufacturing processes. Though, including production scheduling in the energy optimization of manufacturing processes can considerably increase energy efficiency, especially if batch processes are involved. This work identifies the potential of combined energy and production scheduling in Industrial Energy Hubs, using a chipboard production process as a use case. The chipboard production plant includes a combined heat and power unit, units for production, and has two district heating demands as external requirements. A generic modeling and optimization framework, based on mixed-integer linear programming, is used to model and optimize different scenarios. The results show that the scheduling of product has a significant impact on the energy management of the chipboard production plant: The required energy for the production units can be reduced by approximately 30 %. Nevertheless, this potential can only be exploited if process design is adapted and excess heat is utilized appropriately.