Modelling and Forecasting the Residential Electricity Consumption in Brazil with Pegels Exponential Smoothing Techniques

The importance of the residential class in the consumption of electricity in the Brazilian Electric System (BES) can be recognized by its quantitative size, as it, in 2013, concentrates 27% of the total consumption and 85% among all consumers. Also, in this class are the main public policies such as subsidies for consumer units inhabited by low-income families, labelling and increased energy efficiency of appliances used in the home and others. This paper aims to model and forecast the Brazilian residential energy consumption, up to 2050, with Pegels exponential smoothing techniques. In addition to the forecasts with the best model in sample, an optimization procedure of the model's hyper parameters is carried out in order to adjust the projections provided by the Energy Research Company (ERC). The results obtained show that it is possible to predict satisfactorily the electricity consumption for the proposed horizon with minimum error in sample. And the exercise of optimization proved to be important for providing level and trend equations for the official expectations regarding the residential electricity consumption in Brazil. (C) 2015 Published by Elsevier B.V.