The deregulation of the electric utility and natural gas industries and, in some localities, the advent of “real-time pricing” for electric power, have introduced a new dynamic into the decision-making processes that determine how these utilities are purchased and managed within an industrial plant. The process becomes even more complicated when an enterprise wishes to manage these utilities at the corporate level for a number of their manufacturing plants. While the optimum energy distributions within each plant can be determined independently, the results are very dependent on the instantaneous prices of the various purchased utilities, each of which may be...