Border region commercial electricity demand

Border region electric utilities face unique circumstances in attempting to assess overall business and load demand conditions. These result from the many business cycle conditions facing these entities as a consequence of operating near international political boundaries. Can international economic fluctuations be systematically incorporated into electricity demand models? Along the U.S.-Mexico border, this problem is further complicated by economic interactions between an advanced economy and a developing country where data constraints exist at the regional level of disaggregation. Transfer function autoregressive moving average analysis is utilized to examine whether commercial electricity sales in El Paso, Texas respond to the national and metropolitan business cycles affecting economic performance in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. Together, these cities form one of the largest international metropolitan areas in the world. This provides a logical starting point when considering the questions raised in this paper.