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Jessica M. Anthony1 
and Gautam1
1 Department of Economic and Policy Research, Reserve Bank of India, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India
Creative Commons Non Commercial CC BY-NC: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-Commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed.
This article delves into the factors determining the overall electricity demand in India, employing an autoregressive distributed lag model (ARDL) bounds cointegration approach from 1991 to 2021. Investigating the level relationship reveals that gross domestic product (GDP), industrial efficiency, urbanisation level, and economic structural changes could be the primary ‘long-run forcing’ variables that explain aggregate domestic electricity demand in India. The findings indicate a positive relationship between the explanatory variables and electricity consumption, aligning with earlier studies. The scenario analysis shows that the projected electricity demand for 2027 is in line with that of the projections of Central Electricity Authority.
Electricity consumption, thermal power, ARDL bounds test, per capita income
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