Energy optimization of an industrial cluster: a cooperative coalition approach

Large electricity consumers, such as industrial factories, are significantly affected by intermittent renewable energies and volatile electricity prices. In addition, they have limited options for immediate load shifting, as the production process is optimized favouring internal constraints over external market conditions. The creation of an energy cluster between industrial factories can provide benefits in coordinating the electricity consumption schedules, leveraging shared energy assets, reducing costs and CO2 emissions. It also providing relief to grid operators in the form of increased demand side flexibility, which can improve hosting capacity of renewable energies by adding load side control capabilities. This defines the boundaries for the creation of a cooperative coalition, where individual benefits are secondary to the global benefit of the cluster. This work presents a case study of a MILP optimization model to minimize the total costs of energy provision of an industrial cluster comprised by 6 factories, using synthetic data simulating real use cases. This framework is developed as part of the services of the Horizon Europe project “FLEX4FACT – Industrial flexibility platform for sustainable factories”.