Industrial (Process Load)
When energy is an input to your process, procurement isn't overhead management — it's operations.
Chemical plants, refineries, paper mills, wood products facilities, and other process-load industrials have energy profiles that are fundamentally different from discrete manufacturers or commercial buildings. Alden Energy works with process-load customers who need a market-savvy advisor, not just a broker with a bid sheet.
What We Focus On
Contract structure for complex load profiles. The four variations of "fixed pricing" in Texas aren't equivalent, and the right structure for a process-load customer depends on how congestion, line losses, and ancillary services interact with your specific consumption pattern. We verify the right structure before going to market.
Long-range market monitoring. Large process industrials often start monitoring forward pricing 2–4 years in advance of contract expiration. We support that cadence — providing regular market updates, flagging favorable windows, and building the analysis needed for executive-level procurement decisions.
Index pricing consideration. For certain process operations with load flexibility, real-time index pricing deserves a serious look. We can model what historical index pricing would have meant for your load profile and help you evaluate the risk/reward honestly.
Why Process Load Is Different
For process industrials, electricity and natural gas aren't just utility bills — they're cost inputs that affect margins, competitiveness, and in some cases, production decisions. The load profiles are complex: high demand, often 24/7 operation, process-dependent consumption patterns, and in some cases, the ability to modulate load in response to market conditions.
That complexity cuts both ways. It means procurement requires more sophistication — the right contract structure for a continuous process load is different from what works for a discrete manufacturer. It also means the opportunity is larger, because getting procurement right on a high-load account has proportionally bigger dollar impact.
For the largest industrial accounts — those with significant curtailment capability and 5–15 minute response times — demand response programs managed by specialized vendors may be appropriate, and we'll point you in that direction if it's the right fit rather than trying to serve a need outside our primary focus.
Frequently Asked Questions
Our energy spend is large enough that we have internal resources focused on it — where do you add value?
Market timing, supplier relationships, and an independent benchmark on whether the pricing you're seeing is genuinely competitive. Internal teams are good at managing process; we're good at knowing when the market is offering something worth taking.
What about natural gas procurement for process use?
We handle natural gas procurement alongside electricity — same process, same market monitoring approach, same independent benchmarking.