In this paper,by analyzing the characteristics of the energy system of the dryer section in paper machines,a nonlinear programming（NLP） model of the system energy is established,and the corresponding optimization method is proposed.In the method,the dryer section is divided into several functional modules,and the process model of each module is set up based on material and energy balance.By using the operation parameter ranges as the constraints and by taking the minimum energy consumption per unit product as the objective,the ope-ration parameters corresponding to the minimum energy consumption are determined with the help of the algorithm presented in Matlab.It is found that the proposed NLP model is well adaptive and convenient for the energy optimization at different operation parameters,concretely,for newsprint machines,the energy consumption in the dryer section reduces by about 6%.