Deregulation of the energy market has created new opportunities for the development of new energy-management methods based on energy assets, risk management, energy efficiency and sustainable development. Industrial energy-flow management in pharmaceutical systems, with a responsible approach to sustainable development, is a complex task. For this reason, an energy-information centre, with over 14,000 online measured data/nodes, was implemented. This paper presents the energy-flow rate, exergy-flow rate and cost-flow rate diagrams, with emphasis on cost-flow rate per energy unit or exergy unit of complex pharmaceutical systems. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.