Modelling the hourly Spanish electricity demand

In the electricity generating sector of an economy, supply hardly responds to unexpected demand increases. Furthermore, the seasonal pattern accounts for a major part of short-term variations in demand. In this sense, identifying the salient features of this pattern could contribute in avoiding supply problems. This paper is concerned with the analysis of the seasonal behaviour of the hourly Spanish electricity demand. Structural models are used to handle these hourly observations and splines are embedded within such models to create parsimonious formulations of periodic effects that are able to cope leap years. (c) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.