Energy & Utilities
2 optimization problems
PV, Battery, Generator, Load — Every 15 Minutes, How Much of Which Source Should I Run?
You operate a tourism site, university campus, small industrial estate, or a 100-500 household island/rural microgrid with 200-1500 kW of rooftop solar, a 100-500 kWh battery, and a 50-200 kW backup diesel generator. Every 5-15 minutes you must make four coupled calls at once: how much energy to import from the grid and whether to send surplus solar back to the grid or into the battery, whether to charge, discharge or hold the battery, whether to fire up the generator, and which flexible loads run now versus later. Get the order wrong and surplus solar is pushed back to the grid without a contract, peak-tariff electricity is bought at night, the generator burns fuel at the wrong hour, and when the grid drops it is unclear whether critical loads (cold chain, server room, lift) stay powered. Rule-of-thumb dispatch on a 1 MW PV + 500 kWh battery + 200 kW generator site burns 0.8-3M TRY of operating margin per year.
What Should I Consume When, to Drop the Bill?
Written for SMB manufacturers or industrial-zone facilities consuming 2-20 GWh per year (textile, foundry, plastics, food processing, cold storage, hotel). If half your bill is the day/peak/night tariff split or the connected-power (kW) charge, but you still decide intuitively which load runs at which hour, the leak compounds every month. Shifting time-flexible loads (melting furnace, compressors, cold storage, pumps) from peak hours to cheap windows typically cuts the bill by 12-30%; with on-site renewables or a battery the gap widens further. On a 5M TRY annual bill the typical savings band is 600K-1.5M TRY/year, and without a structured hourly plan you leave most of it on the table.