A General Variable Neighborhood Search heuristic for short term load forecasting in Smart Grids environment

Energy plants represent large energy consumers with a wide array of energy needs, assets (e.g. boilers, chillers, storage, on-site generation), and constraints on operations. An innovative energy management system for energy plants is presented in this paper. Through predictive optimization of plant assets, energy analytics, pricing signals, and historical and realtime data, the online energy management system supplies energy plants with salient hourly, real-time recommendations and enables “what-if” analysis to achieve improved economic efficiency. Within a systems context, the paper draws upon ideas from power systems and highlights technical issues related to plant optimization. The paper also describes actual implementations of the energy management solution at two energy plants in the US, providing economic details and an analysis of the savings achieved.