Energies, Vol. 11, Pages 1454: Convex Programming and Bootstrap Sensitivity for Optimized Electricity Bill in Healthcare Buildings under a Time-Of-Use Pricing Scheme (Energies)

Efficient energy management is strongly dependent on determining the adequate power contracts among the ones offered by different electricity suppliers. This topic takes special relevance in healthcare buildings, where noticeable amounts of energy are required to generate an adequate health environment for patients and staff. In this paper, a convex optimization method is scrutinized to give a straightforward analysis of the optimal power levels to be contracted while minimizing the electricity bill cost in a time-of-use pricing scheme. In addition, a sensitivity analysis is carried out on the constraints in the optimization problems, which are analyzed in terms of both their empirical distribution and their bootstrap-estimated statistical distributions to create a simple-to-use tool for this purpose, the so-called mosaic-distribution. The evaluation of the proposed method was carried out with five-year consumption data on two different kinds of healthcare buildings, a large one given by Hospital Universitario de Fuenlabrada, and a primary care center, Centro de Especialidades el Arroyo, both located at Fuenlabrada (Madrid, Spain). The analysis of the resulting optimization shows that the annual savings achieved vary moderately, ranging from −0.22 % to +27.39%, depending on the analyzed year profile and the healthcare building type. The analysis introducing mosaic-distribution to represent the sensitivity score also provides operative information to evaluate the convenience of implementing energy saving measures. All this information is useful for managers to determine the appropriate power levels for next year contract renewal and to consider whether to implement demand response mechanisms in healthcare buildings.