Improving Energy Costs of a Water Treatment Plant through Optimal Energy Management

We propose efficient control strategies for deciding the amount of energy that water pumps need to be scheduled overtime with the objective of minimizing the Peak Charge and the Energy Charge components of the water treatment plant electricity bill. We consider first the case where the plant power demands throughout the whole billing cycle are known and we present an optimal peak shifting control strategy. We then propose an efficient control strategy when we only know predictions of the electricity demand in a short duration in the future. Several comparative studies are conducted based on real traces from a Water Treatment Plant in order to validate the proposed techniques.