(23b) Decision-Making Tool for the Optimal Planning and Scheduling of Utility Assets

With the cost of energy driven by the market in many places and the number of environmental regulations increasing, companies are more and more focused on improving their energy management tools to achieve a more efficient allocation of their energy assets while reducing the environmental impact. When to buy and store fuel, when to produce and sell electric power to the grid while satisfying internal demand, when to start-up or shut-down the cogeneration units, are a few of the many questions energy schedulers often face on a daily basis and whose answers have a great impact on the profitability of the site. Tackling these questions successfully is not trivial since it requires not only considering the system in the current state but also future potential states.

With this in mind, in this paper we introduce our Energy Multi-Period Optimizer technology [1], an energy management software (VM-EMPO) for optimal planning and scheduling of utilities assets. VM-EMPO allows scheduling engineers and operators to find the optimal operation of the utility plants on a time horizon when dealing with time dependent constraints. These constraints are often related to fuel tank farms, thermal energy storages, minimum/maximum start/stop time of equipment, and planned out-of-service periods. VM-EMPO offers a robust modeling and optimization engine and an easy-to-use graphical user interface.

We illustrate the benefits of using VM-EMPO in two energy management applications. Namely, the optimal operation of a thermal energy storage and chillers in a district cooling system and the optimal fuel storage management and cogeneration unit operation in the steam system of a petrochemical plant.

[1] Ruiz, J. P., Santollani, O., Optimal Planning and Scheduling of Utility Assets, Industrial Energy Technology Conference (IETC) Proceedings (2016).