Normally the plant runs at a constant rate of energy consumption, due to restrictions in how the production process works.
This means sometimes there will be a deficit of available electricity, other times there will be a surplus.
They plan to change their production process such that they can:
1. soak up the surplus usefully when it is present
and
2. "give back" energy to the grid by reducing their own consumption when there is a deficit
They never feed back any energy, they just make it so more energy is available on the grid by reducing their own consumption.
The difficult part here is that there is a certain engineering effort necessary to make this possible in the first place without disrupting the production process.
Some years ago Germany "deregulated" its energy sector. The energy providers are buying and selling electricity on exchange markets where prices change with supply and demand.
Today, industrial clients are changing to dynamic pricing schemes instead of fixed price-per-kWh contracts with a supplier. That means they also schedule their consumption to profit from low prices when supply is high and demand low.
In the future, big industrial clients could take an even more active role on the energy markets and directly trade capacity without an energy supplier as intermediary. Germany invests a lot in the grid infrastructure to enable more flexibility and decentralized energy sources without risking black outs. They have to do so, as it was politically decided to phase out all nuclear power plants after Fukushima happened. But it's not easy since nuclear plants provide a very stable "supply base" whereas the rising renewables are more volatile.
http://www.innovationsforum-energiewende.de/wp-content/uploa...
To put this in simple terms:
Normally the plant runs at a constant rate of energy consumption, due to restrictions in how the production process works.
This means sometimes there will be a deficit of available electricity, other times there will be a surplus.
They plan to change their production process such that they can:
1. soak up the surplus usefully when it is present
and
2. "give back" energy to the grid by reducing their own consumption when there is a deficit
They never feed back any energy, they just make it so more energy is available on the grid by reducing their own consumption.
The difficult part here is that there is a certain engineering effort necessary to make this possible in the first place without disrupting the production process.