Content area
Full text
Abstract
Existing research on the application of the microgrid with renewable sources mainly focused on the residential buildings and critical facilities, while largely neglecting the industrial manufacturing sector. Indeed, manufacturing industry contributes a large portion of energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions to the environment. In addition, the manufacturing industry is also affected the most by power outages. The utilization of Microgrid technology can reduce the environmental impacts and improve the resilience of the manufacturing activities. In this paper, a simulation model including both a manufacturing system module and a microgrid module will be established to investigate the feasibility of the application of microgrid technology in manufacturing. A real auto component manufacturing system will be simulated. Different renewable resources with different sizes serving as onsite generation sources to provide the energy to the manufacturing system will be examined regarding their financial performance and energy generation capability.
Keywords
Sustainable manufacturing, microgrid, onsite, renewable
Introduction
A microgrid is a localized energy system that consists of distributed energy sources and loads. It is able to operate either completely separate from, or connected to, the existing utility power grid (Mahieux & Oudalov, 2015; U.S. DOE, 2014; Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 2016). The energy supply of the microgrid can be sourced from renewable energy, such as wind and solar. Usually, the microgrid is connected to the traditional utility grid so that it can satisfy the electricity demand with external utility when the load surpasses the energy supply of the microgrid. It can also sell power back to the utility grid when the microgrid generates more than the on-site needs.
Microgrids can relieve the possible disturbances when the utility grid is down. Thus, the reliability, affordability, resilience, and security of energy supply to end users can be greatly improved. In addition, it can also reduce the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and relieve the stress on transmission and distribution systems. Therefore, some pioneer microgrid projects have been implemented in residential housing (Ahourai & Faruque, 2013; Roggia, Rech, Schuch, Baggio, Hey, & Pinheiro, 2011; Hawkes & Leach, 2007) and some critical facilities, such as medical centers, financial corporations, military bases, and jails (NYDHSES, 2014; Stadler, 2014).
As for the industrial sector, it accounts for one third of total energy consumption in the...