For an energy-limited economy system, it is crucial to forecast load demand accurately. This paper devotes to 1-week-ahead daily load forecasting approach in which load demand series are predicted by employing the information of days before being similar to that of the forecast day. As well as in many nonlinear systems, seasonal item and trend item are coexisting in load demand datasets. In this paper, the existing of the seasonal item in the load demand data series is firstly verified according to the Kendall tau correlation testing method. Then in the belief of the separate forecasting to the seasonal item and the trend item would improve the forecasting accuracy, hybrid models by combining seasonal exponential adjustment method (SEAM) with the regression methods are proposed in this paper, where SEAM and the regression models are employed to seasonal and trend items forecasting respectively. Comparisons of the quartile values as well as the mean absolute percentage error values demonstrate this forecasting technique can significantly improve the accuracy though models applied to the trend item forecasting are eleven different ones. This superior performance of this separate forecasting technique is further confirmed by the paired-sample T tests. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.