*Corresponding author’s e-mail: rubel.ruet10@gmail.com ASM Sc. J., 16, 2021 https://doi.org/10.32802/asmscj.2021.609 Time Series Long-Term Forecasting of per Capita Electricity Consumption for Bangladesh Md. Hasan Ali 1 , Robiul Islam Rubel 2∗ and Md. Ariful Alam 3 1 Department of Industrial Engineering, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada 2 Department of Agriculture and Biosystem Engineering, South Dakota State University, SD, USA 3 Department of Industrial and Production Engineering, Bangladesh Army University of Science and Technology, Saidpur- 5310, Bangladesh Bangladesh government has announced Vision-2041 of electricity generation and distribution to uplift the socio-economic conditions of Bangladesh. It is now entering into the list of middle-income countries and now planning for energy as one key measure to sustainable development. Policymakers are trying to forecast the future per capita electricity consumption and set up a feasible way of electricity generation over longer periods for sustainable development of Bangladesh through preventing underestimation or overestimation that could cause a huge loss in the financial sector of Bangladesh. This work focuses on long-term estimation of electricity consumption for Bangladesh, time series models have been used to forecast per capita electricity consumption from fiscal year (FY) 2019/20-2040/41 (next 22 years). An actual past historical data of FY 1976/77-2018/19 (43 years) has been analysed on Minitab 17 to get the most favourable time series model for forecasting per capita electricity consumption of Bangladesh. ARIMA has appeared as the most accurate time series model over the actual historical data of 43 years with the lowest MAPE, MAD, and MSD as 4.50, 3.23, and 15.40, respectively. Keywords: forecasting; electricity consumption; sustainable development; time series models; ARIMA I. INTRODUCTION Bangladesh is one of the fastest developing countries reported by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) (Bangladesh and Asian Development Bank, 2018). Bangladesh has declared energy as a main sector of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (Sustainable Development Goals of Bangladesh, 2015), of the United Nations agreement to be achieved by the year 2030 (Sustainable Development Agenda in United Nations, 2015), and planned to reach high-income country status through Vision 2041 (Bangladesh Development Update, 2019). Among the SDGs of Bangladesh, self-dependency in the energy sector is the leading one. With the rapid industrialisation and development, electricity consumption in Bangladesh has drastically increased over the last two decades (Key Energy Statistics of Bangladesh, 2018). Considering Bangladesh’s current economic growth and improved quality of living standards (World Bank Data, 2018), self-dependency and self-sustainability in electricity are essential. Therefore, good planning of electricity generation and estimation of future per capita consumption is essential to secure the SDGs. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), developing regions such as countries from Asia and Africa are anticipated to experience a high need for energy from the year 2017 to 2040 (World Energy Outlook, 2018). Being a developing country, the growing economy of Bangladesh needs uninterrupted electricity in the near future. Bangladesh Power Development Board (BPDB) has reported 374.62 kWh/per capita electricity consumption in FY 2018/19, which is pretty high compared to its first