Cost-Efficient Pump Operation in Water Supply Systems Considering Demand-Side Management

Demand-side management (DSM) programs are essential to accommodate larger shares of distributed, variable, renewable energy generation. These programs can be used by water utilities to foster a more sustainable operational management. In this work, an integrated DSM strategy is adopted for the optimal control of pumping loads to reduce energy costs in a water supply system (WSS). For this purpose, the participation in demand response programs, namely, using time-of-use (TOU) and real-time pricing (RTP), as well as on-site renewable energy generation, are explored. A gradient-based method was used to optimize the pump scheduling based on a nonlinear programming model integrating hydraulic simulation with optimization tools. The main original contribution of this work is the development of a thorough optimization model integrating available supply and demand energy resources into WSS operational management, as well as presenting a novel approach to formulate the pump operation problem. The Anytown WSS benchmark is used to validate the proposed model. The results show a decrease of 11%-52% in the cost of WSS operation when considering an integrated optimization of the available energy resources in a time-differentiated tariffs context.