Optimization and Management of On-Site Power Plants Under Time-of-Use Power Price: A Case Study in Steel Mill

The implementation of time-of-use (TOU) power tariff in Chinese steel industry provides an opportunity for steel mills to reduce electricity bills through an optimal collaboration between the on-site power plant (OSPP) and energy storage equipment (gasholders). In this paper, a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) based scheduling model was proposed to achieve the optimal operation of OSPP and gasholders in a steel mill under TOU tariff. Compared with previous models, we considered the influence of TOU power tariff on the optimal scheduling of OSPP. The results of a case study demonstrate that the optimization model can achieve better peak-valley shifting of the electricity generation and decrease the electricity purchasing cost by 7.5% with improved gasholder stability. In addition, the overall power generation efficiency can be increased by 2.13% using the proposed model, which indicates that the byproduct gases can be effectively and efficiently used.