Abstract
Managing electrical energy supply is a complex task. The most important part of electric utility resource planning is forecasting of the future load demand in the regional or national service area. This is usually achieved by constructing models on relative information, such as climate and previous load demand data. In this paper, a genetic programming approach is proposed to forecast long term electrical power consumption in the area covered by a utility situated in the southeast of Turkey. The empirical results demonstrate successful load forecast with a low error rate.