Our paper titled, “Watts and Drops: Co-Scheduling Power and Water in Desalination Plants“ has been accepted at the IEEE 61st Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing, which will be held September 17-19, 2025 at Urbana, Illinois.
The abstract of the paper is given below:
We develop a mathematical framework to jointly schedule water and electricity in a profit-maximizing water desalination plant that operates both thermal- and membrane-based desalination technologies that are co-located with renewable generation. The price-taking desalination plant sells desalinated water to a water utility at a given price and engages in bi-directional electricity transactions with the grid, purchasing or selling power based on its net electricity demand. We show that the optimal scheduling policy depends on the plant’s internal renewable generation and follows a simple threshold structure. Under the optimal policy, thermal-based water output decreases monotonically with renewable availability, while membrane-based output increases monotonically. We characterize the structure and intuition behind the threshold policy and examine key special properties.
