Evaluation of the Energy Flexible Operation of Machine Tool Components

With the recent increase in the use of renewable energies, such as photovoltaic and wind energy, both companies and energy providers are confronted with an increasingly volatile energy supply, caused by alternating weather conditions. In the case of on-site generation of electric power by wind and solar resources, it can be beneficial to adjust the company-wide power consumption to these fluctuations. This paper presents a real-time control approach for adapting the use-time of energy-flexible components under the constraints imposed by a fluctuating supply from renewables, the requirements on machine tools and indeed, the manufacturing process itself. Based on a hypothetical medium-sized manufacturing company, this paper evaluates different scenarios with regard to varying weather conditions. For the real-time control, no weather forecasts are necessary and the machine tools' productivity is maintained using select machine components. It can be observed that, given a certain fluctuation within the power supply, rescheduling the use-time of energy-flexible machine tool components leads to a higher utilization degree of the own supplied energy by renewables. This paper depicts a scenario that provides the preconditions for an economic operation of the proposed strategy.