DC-INDUSTRIE

Both projects, DC-INDUSTRIE from 2016 to 2019, and DC-INDUSTRIE2 from 2019 to 2023, were funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action. The partners and their more than 150 engineers and researchers have been working on the seamless, efficient integration of renewable energies (e.g. solar panels on factory roofs) and storage systems to balance electricity supply and demand in factories. DC-INDUSTRIE2 focused on the direct current supply of an entire production hall, after the direct current supply of a production cell has already been realized within DC-INDUSTRIE by 2019.

The benefits of Direct Current (DC) installations shown in the projects include:

• Up to 50 % reduction of copper use in cabling (50 % for three-phase AC motors driven by frequency converters)
• Up to 50 % reduction of power loss in cabling
• Up to 80 % reduction of the peak power drawn from the AC supply grid through integration of local energy storage
• Complete recovery of braking energy
• Resilient system – storage devices supply enough energy to complete a production cycle in cases of power outage. Production can continue seamlessly when power is restored.

Please find publications, the comprehensive system description, videos, images and more on these pages in the right column.