  The relationship between energy demand and variables such as economic
activity and weather is well established. However, this paper aims to explore
the connection between energy demand and other social aspects, which receive
little attention. Through the use of natural language processing on a large
news corpus, we shed light on this important link. This study was carried out
in five regions of the UK and Ireland and considers multiple horizons from 1 to
30 days. It also considers economic variables such as GDP, unemployment and
inflation. We found that: 1) News about military conflicts, transportation, the
global pandemic, regional economics, and the international energy market are
related to electricity demand. 2) Economic indicators are more important in the
East Midlands and Northern Ireland, while social indicators are more useful in
the West Midlands and the South West of England. 3) The use of these indices
improved forecasting performance by up to 9%.
