  Long-term load forecasting plays a vital role for utilities and planners in
terms of grid development and expansion planning. An overestimate of long-term
electricity load will result in substantial wasted investment in the
construction of excess power facilities, while an underestimate of future load
will result in insufficient generation and unmet demand. This paper presents
first-of-its-kind approach to use multiplicative error model (MEM) in
forecasting load for long-term horizon. MEM originates from the structure of
autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (ARCH) model where conditional
variance is dynamically parameterized and it multiplicatively interacts with an
innovation term of time-series. Historical load data, accessed from a U.S.
regional transmission operator, and recession data for years 1993-2016 is used
in this study. The superiority of considering volatility is proven by
out-of-sample forecast results as well as directional accuracy during the great
economic recession of 2008. To incorporate future volatility, backtesting of
MEM model is performed. Two performance indicators used to assess the proposed
model are mean absolute percentage error (for both in-sample model fit and
out-of-sample forecasts) and directional accuracy.
