Revenue increase for German dairy farmers through cross-value chain energy management

Dairy farms in Germany often face the challenge of not operating profitably due to effects such as volatile sales prices, high investment efforts, increasing procurement costs and high regulatory requirements. Against this background, farmers are highly interested in new sources of income besides conventional revenue streams such as milk or animal sales. Implementing cross-value chain energy management is one way to generate such additional revenue streams for barns. Therefore, target of the new initiative "DairyChainEnergy" is to provide a solution that enables farms to boost their sales of power and energy data. In order to quantify impact of this new research idea, a scenario analysis was conducted to assess the future revenue increase for German dairy farmers through application of cross-value chain energy management. Results of this analysis indicate that "DairyChainEnergy" could become one of the most relevant drivers for increasing energy-related revenues for farms. Due to these findings, the research idea is to be further detailed addressing a threefold problem statement (stakeholders, applications, implementation).