This paper proposes a new adaptive protection setting methodology for steel manufacturer users considering the tap-to-tap varying current consumption. Minimizing the total clearing time of relays is computed adding the restriction of the incident energy to avoid hazard conditions. Under this proposed procedure excessive time delays between relays is avoided. The proposed methodology carries out the detection of abrupt changes in current consumption to detect tap-to-tap change in operation stages. The application of this methodology is performed for a steel manufacturer user and shows different values of incident energy computed with each of the protection settings.