  Optimal scheduling of deferrable electrical loads can reshape the aggregated
load profile to achieve higher operational efficiency and reliability. This
paper studies deferrable load scheduling under demand charge that imposes a
penalty on the peak consumption over a billing period. Such a terminal cost
poses challenges in real-time dispatch when demand forecasts are inaccurate. A
block model-predictive control approach is proposed by breaking demand charge
into a sequence of stage costs. The problem of charging electric vehicles is
used to illustrate the efficacy of the proposed approach. Numerical examples
show that the block model-predictive control outperforms benchmark methods in
various settings.
