DEMAND
Annex D
In a capital intensive industry such as CLP's it is
essential that forecasts of future demand be as accurate as
possible since they determine the resources required for expansion (labour, equipment and finance).
The Government and CLP have tried various ways of
estimating future demand for electricity and an outline of these methods with some details of their relationship to methods used to forecast
future sales is presented below.
Government's Forecasts
(a) Basic Approach & Assumptions
The first decision to be taken was whether to work
on the total demand for electricity throughout Hong Kong or to deal separately with the demand for CLP's and HKE's output. Had sufficient data been available it would have
been preferable to work on the demand for the individual companies, but although sales data are available for each
company, there are no separate figures of the key
economic variables income and GDP for the two
geographical areas.
Nevertheless it was decided to keep
the estimates separate on the assumption that income in
each area would bear a stable relationship to total GDP.
Secondly, it would have been better to estimate
demand for domestic, industrial and commercial users
separately. But the available break down on sales does
not go back far enough to be reliable. Even if usable figures for each category of sales and associated