Efficient Industrial Refrigeration Scheduling with Peak Pricing

TL;DR

This paper investigates optimal control strategies for industrial refrigeration systems to minimize energy costs, especially under peak pricing schemes, combining theoretical analysis and simulations to improve energy efficiency.

Contribution

It characterizes optimal control policies under various energy pricing structures and highlights the limitations of classical threshold policies in peak pricing scenarios.

Findings

Classical threshold policies are optimal under TOU costs.

Peak pricing challenges the optimality of threshold policies.

Simulation results provide insights for better refrigeration control strategies.

Abstract

The widespread use of industrial refrigeration systems across various sectors contribute significantly to global energy consumption, highlighting substantial opportunities for energy conservation through intelligent control design. As such, this work focuses on control algorithm design in industrial refrigeration that minimize operational costs and provide efficient heat extraction. By adopting tools from inventory control, we characterize the structure of these optimal control policies, exploring the impact of different energy cost-rate structures such as time-of-use (TOU) pricing and peak pricing. While classical threshold policies are optimal under TOU costs, introducing peak pricing challenges their optimality, emphasizing the need for carefully designed control strategies in the presence of significant peak costs. We provide theoretical findings and simulation studies on this phenomenon, offering insights for more efficient industrial refrigeration management.