Vehicle-to-Production als Teil des datengetriebenen Energiemanagements

In operational energy systems, electric commercial vehicles have so far mainly been regarded as additional loads. Vehicle-to-Production (V2P) extends this view: within their operational availability, the traction batteries of electric light commercial vehicles (eLCVs) can serve as flexible storage for production sites. Optimizing vehicles and buildings separately falls short — production schedules, PV generation, stationary storage, grid limits, delivery routes, cooling demand, and minimum state-of-charge requirements must all be considered together.

Methodological core is a three-tier Energy Center with strategic, tactical, and operational levels, whose model components are connected via a Digital Twin Eco System. The approach was validated using real measurement and fleet data from a bakery and a printing company, and demonstrated via bidirectional retrofit hardware on two electric commercial vehicles (ePTO interfaces, 230 V AC / 400 V DC).

Background

The electrification of light commercial vehicle fleets directly links operational mobility to a production site’s energy system. This creates additional electricity consumption, while at the same time the vehicle batteries are periodically available as storage. Vehicle-to-Production (V2P) refers to the controlled integration of vehicle batteries into a production facility’s energy management. Unlike a general vehicle-to-grid approach, the focus here is on operational value creation, production reliability, and the mobility that must remain available at all times.

Significance

The essential contribution of V2P lies in integrating systems previously considered separately: vehicle batteries are understood not merely as storage, but as a periodically available resource of a production facility. Three benefit pathways emerge for companies: higher self-consumption of PV generation through coordinated charging and discharging, lower load peaks and grid draw, and simulation-based sizing that avoids unnecessarily large investments in stationary storage. V2P should be understood as operationally bounded flexibility, not as freely available storage capacity at all times.

Outlook

In the context of planned activities at the Green Energy Center Living Lab and the FLEXI and REINFORCE projects, concrete opportunities exist for further knowledge transfer. The Green Energy Center Living Lab provides a suitable validation environment for this, among other things for the “Power on Demand” and “Power to Hydrogen” approaches. Three possible exploitation pathways have been identified: an Energy Center software product for analysis, planning, and decision support; a modularly integrable Digital Twin optimization module; and an interoperable real-time monitoring and data platform for industrial energy systems. V2P should therefore not be understood as an isolated vehicle project, but as a building block of a longer-term research and innovation line for data-driven, cross-sector energy management systems.

Related Reading:

• The GEC Living Lab: Beyond Sector Coupling and Conventional Energy Transition, https://green-energy-center.com/the-gec-living-lab-beyond-sector-coupling-and-conventional-energy-transition/
• Can a Problem-Oriented Methodology Be Generalized? https://green-energy-center.com/can-a-problem-oriented-methodology-be-generalized/