  The widespread use of industrial refrigeration systems across various sectors
contribute significantly to global energy consumption, highlighting substantial
opportunities for energy conservation through intelligent control design. As
such, this work focuses on control algorithm design in industrial refrigeration
that minimize operational costs and provide efficient heat extraction. By
adopting tools from inventory control, we characterize the structure of these
optimal control policies, exploring the impact of different energy cost-rate
structures such as time-of-use (TOU) pricing and peak pricing. While classical
threshold policies are optimal under TOU costs, introducing peak pricing
challenges their optimality, emphasizing the need for carefully designed
control strategies in the presence of significant peak costs. We provide
theoretical findings and simulation studies on this phenomenon, offering
insights for more efficient industrial refrigeration management.
