Forecasting India’s Electricity Demand Using a Range of Probabilistic Methods

With serious energy poverty, especially concerning power shortages, the economic development of India has been severely restricted. To some extent, power exploitation can effectively alleviate the shortage of energy in India. Thus, it is significant to balance the relationship between power supply and demand, and further stabilize the two in a reasonable scope. To achieve balance, a prediction of electricity generation in India is required. Thus, in this study, five methods, the metabolism grey model, autoregressive integrated moving average, metabolic grey model-auto regressive integrated moving average model, non-linear metabolic grey model and non-linear metabolic grey model-auto regressive integrated moving average model, are applied. We combine the characteristics of linear and nonlinear models, making a prediction and comparison of Indian power generation. In this way, we enrich methods for prediction research on electrical energy, which avoids large errors in trends of electricity generation due to those accidental factors when a single predictive model is used. In terms of prediction outcomes, the average relative errors from five models above are 1.67%, 1.62%, 0.84%, 1.84%, and 1.37%, respectively, which indicates high accuracy and reference value of these methods. In conclusion, India’s power generation will continue to grow with an average annual growth rate of 5.17% in the next five years (2018–2022).