The climate crisis necessitates a global shift to achieve a secure, sustainable, and affordable energy system toward a green energy transition reaching climate neutrality by 2050. Because of this, renewable energy sources have come to the forefront and the research interest in microgrids which rely on distributed generation and storage systems has exploded. Furthermore, many new markets for energy trading, ancillary services, and frequency reserve markets have provided attractive investment opportunities in exchange for balancing the supply and demand of electricity. Artificial intelligence can be utilized to locally optimize energy consumption, trade energy with the main grid, and participate in these markets. Reinforcement learning (RL) is one of the most promising approaches to achieve this goal because it enables an agent to learn optimal behavior in a microgrid by executing specific actions that maximize the long-term reward signal/function. The study focuses on testing two optimization algorithms: logic-based optimization and reinforcement learning. This paper proposes an optimization algorithm based on reinforcement learning in an industrial microgrid that is capable of trading energy with the main grid, providing significant cost savings. The RL-based approach is implemented in Python based on real data from the site and in combination with MATLAB-Simulink to validate its results. The application of the RL algorithm achieved an average monthly cost saving of 20% compared to logic-based optimization and 86% savings compared to not using any optimization. These findings contribute to digitalization and decarbonization of energy technology and support fundamental goals and policies of the European Green Deal.
