Electricity utilities all over the world have been undergoing radical changes in their market and its regulatory structure. A basic trend in this restructuring process has been to promote competition in generation, distribution/retailing segments and participation of private agents in the energy production process. This restructuring is based on centralized optimization, by market-oriented approaches: Generators bid prices for their energy in a Wholesale Energy Market - WEM. Instead of following an expansion schedule produced by a central planning agency, private agents are free to decide about the construction of generator units and to compete for energy sales contracts with utilities and individual customers.The competitive environment permits, however, which in high spot prices scenarios the electric utilities sell some differences between bilateral contract and real consumption. The possibility of load retraction by means of negotiations with clients would result in surplus generation which could be sold directly to the spot market. On the other hand, the reaction of the Generators via financial means (such as bilateral contracts, forward contracts and option prices) or operational policies from System Operator can result in a WEM -gaming-. This thesis investigates some conceptual issues, methodologies and computational tools developed to operation and commercialization of the electrical energy considering risk analysis and financial instruments. The demand side and retraction management problem is decomposed in two sub-problems: Operation sub-problem: uses stochastic dual dynamic programming (SDDP)tools Risk analysis sub-problem: uses utility theoryThe approach will be illustrated with a case study with data taken from the Brazilian system, where the demand side management is simulated and the numerical results are presented.