“…Energy consumption environment in China is changing rapidly, resulting in very little effective energy data available for prediction. While reliable predictions made by some popular statistical models (Zhang et al ., 2018; Ma et al ., 2019a; Ma and Liu, 2018; Du et al ., 2017, 2019; Wu et al ., 2019a; Fan et al ., 2019; Yang et al ., 2019) often rely on large samples, which shows they are not suitable for annual energy demand forecasting. According to a large number of empirical studies (Ma et al ., 2019b, c; Wang and Ye, 2017; Wu et al ., 2018), the grey model is efficient in small sample prediction and has been widely used in agriculture (Zeng et al ., 2019), energy (Ma et al ., 2019c), tourism (Ma et al ., 2019b), environmental pollutants (Wu et al ., 2020), and geological disasters (Zeng et al ., 2019), etc.…”