Producing, storing, using and selling renewable energy: The best mix for the small medium industry

Over the last decades, the production of "sustainable energy" has provided a very fertile research field, involving aspects that are traditionally considered in an independent manner, namely renewable energy production, energy storage and efficient usage of available energy. A combined analysis of these three aspects within an industrial context is the main focus of this work. We provide an insight on the problems that a small or medium manufacturing firm can expect to address when it decides to move from traditional energy suppliers to an as much as possible autonomous energy production. In particular, we consider the contribution that ICT can offer in order to allow the firm to decide the best size and composition of its own "energy production plant", based on data regarding its production needs and weather-related data. We propose an open source framework aimed at making it possible to model various systems including both energy production, storage and consumption elements. The framework also allows the use of different approaches to optimize and fine tune the system in terms of both design and usage costs. We show how the framework can be specialized in order to be used for a typical industrial test case representing a small medium manufacturing firm that decides to change its position from a pure energy consumer to an energy combined producer, storer and user. (c) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.