A distributed computer energy management and control system (DCEMCS) has been established in a nonferrous metal smeltery. It consists of central computer system, local area computer system, real-time baseband local area network, and measurement and control mechanism. This paper presents the theory and techniques applied to the system design, espec-ially the hardware architecture and the main functions of DCEM CS, the hierarchical configu-ration and the dynamic coordination algorithm based on two level computers, the real-time local area network technique and the programming method, the distributed design technique for the applied software and the basic idea of designing and anaging the energy database.