Energy management for user’s thermal and power needs: A survey

The increasing world energy consumption, the diversity in energy sources, and the pressing environmental goals have made the energy supply–demand balance a major challenge. Additionally, as reducing energy costs is a crucial target in the short term, while sustainability is essential in the long term, the challenge is twofold and contains clashing goals. A more sustainable system and end-users’ behavior can be promoted by offering economic incentives to manage energy use, while saving on energy bills. In this paper, we survey the state-of-the-art in energy management systems for operation scheduling of distributed energy resources and satisfying end-user’s electrical and thermal demands. We address questions such as: how can the energy management problem be formulated? Which are the most common optimization methods and how to deal with forecast uncertainties? Quantitatively, what kind of improvements can be obtained? We provide a novel overview of concepts, models, techniques, and potential economic and emission savings to enhance energy management systems design.