The SynErgie project, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under the “Kopernikus‑Projekte für die Energiewende” call, ran from 2016 until its early termination in 2018. It brought together more than 50 partners from industry and research, with Voith Paper as the lead developer of energy‑efficiency tools for the paper industry. The main objective was to identify flexibility potentials in paper production that could respond to volatile energy markets and to translate these potentials into actionable recommendations or, ideally, into a process‑optimisation software package.

Technically, the project focused on adaptive regulation and planning of energy consumption across the entire paper‑making line, from raw‑material preparation to finished paper. A key deliverable was an automated baseline analysis that visualises energy use and identifies load peaks. This tool was applied to two pilot plants—one in Germany and one abroad—providing detailed energy‑saving opportunities. In the German plant, the analysis highlighted potential reductions in peak loads and the possibility of load shedding, although the latter was deemed limited because the primary goal of the plant is to maintain a stable production process. In the foreign plant, the main opportunities lay in optimising load distribution across different tariff periods during the day, but the plant operator judged the expected cost savings to be too small to justify implementation.

The project also developed modules for dynamic regulation of electrical, thermal, and steam energy, integrating them into the plant’s process control system. These modules were designed to react to real‑time price and supply signals from the energy market, thereby shifting or reducing consumption during high‑price periods. However, the heterogeneity of data structures and national regulatory frameworks across the participating plants made it difficult to scale the software to other customers without significant manual adjustments. The team therefore concluded that while the prototype demonstrated the feasibility of adaptive energy management, its economic viability was questionable for most operators.

Performance values were not explicitly quantified in the report; the focus remained on identifying qualitative savings and cost‑reduction potentials. The OnV Energy Profiler, a modular software solution developed by Voith Paper, was cited as a benchmark for visualising and analysing energy consumption at the level of individual consumers within the plant. The project’s analyses also aimed to benchmark energy utilisation against typical consumption profiles, thereby establishing best practices and identifying suitable pilot sites with significant optimisation potential.

Collaboration-wise, Voith Paper coordinated the development of the software modules and the baseline analysis tool, while the pilot plants provided real‑world data and operational feedback. The project’s partners included academic institutions such as the University of Ulm and the University of Stuttgart, which contributed research on energy flexibility and digital business models. The early exit of Voith Paper in late 2018 was driven by the assessment that the projected cost savings were insufficient and that the scalability of the software solutions would require extensive manual tailoring for each customer. Despite this, the project produced a set of analytical tools and a conceptual framework for adaptive energy management in the paper industry, contributing to the broader goal of synchronising industrial energy demand with volatile renewable supply.