Irrigation networks involve many water and energy aspects, in which the sustainability plays a paramount role. Nowadays, water tariff in irrigation networks represents a high percentage within of farmers' costs, partially due to the low hydraulic and energy efficiency. The installation of pumps working as turbines enables to reduce the pressure and it makes possible the energy generation. In this research, a new maximization methodology to recover energy, considering the feasibility of the installation, was proposed to allocate PATs within networks. Simulated annealing techniques were used with different objective functions as well as different number of machines. Once the maximum energy lines were defined, real machines were selected through the discharge and the head number, considering the available net head in each allocation. Furthermore, the use of WaterGEMS software enabled to simulate the flow, the pressure and the efficiency variation in the installed machine over time. The combined use of WaterGEMS and the simulated annealing in the proposed methodology is a powerful water management tool towards the search of the sustainability in irrigation networks. To illustrate the proposed methodology, a case study was presented, obtaining a recovered energy of 26.51 MW h/year (10% of the provided energy in the network). (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.