Centralized Energy Data Provision for Energy Flexibility in Factories

Rising electricity price volatility driven by renewable generation, combined with increased domestic photovoltaic production, create greater opportunities for factories to reduce energy costs through energy flexibility. Energy flexibility has been demonstrated in production systems and industrial energy supply systems. But control approaches require reliable forecasts of energy demand and supply, yet such information is typically distributed across heterogeneous systems and inconsistently available. This paper presents the open-source Energy Availability Broker (EAB) that provides a data- and forecast-based representation of electricity supply and expected demand within industrial energy systems. Energy availability is modeled as a marginal cost function under capacity constraints and combined with aggregated production and non-production demand profiles. The EAB integrates internal and external data sources, resolves temporal misalignment through forecasting, and exposes structured information via a standardized service interface. A demonstrative deployment at the ETA Research Factory illustrates how productionaware energy availability can be operationalized, enabling consistent informational support for independent scheduling and energy management systems.