Hourly Electricity Load Forecasting: An Empirical Application to the Italian Railways

Due to the liberalization of countless electricity markets, load forecasting has become crucial to all public utilities for which electricity is a strategic variable. With the goal of contributing to the forecasting process inside public utilities, this paper addresses the issue of applying the Holt-Winters exponential smoothing technique and the time series analysis for forecasting the hourly electricity load curve of the Italian railways. The results of the analysis confirm the accuracy of the two models and therefore the relevance of forecasting inside public utilities