Industrial demand adaptation to renewable resources

The usage of renewable energy sources as an alternative energy source is faced with a major challenge introduced by the intermittency nature of the source. We have two options i) adapt the demand to the source, or ii) adapt the source to the demand. If the process demand is flexible and can be adapted to the energy source, it will enjoy cheap energy. Alternatively, non-flexible processes will require extra costs to be paid to adapt the source to the process energy requirements. This paper presents a demand response model to adapt the demand of industrial processes to the available energy source. The model is solved analytically using mixed integer linear programming. Then, three metaheuristic search algorithms were used. The results of the solving algorithms are compared with each other using the Wilcoxons' rank-sum test. Then the model is tested for two examples of flexible and rigid processes showing the differences.