The importance of energy demand estimation stems from energy planning, formulating strategies and recommending energy policies. Most often, energy demand is mathematically formulated by socio-economic indicators. The challenging problem is to determine the optimal or near optimal weighting factors. Inspired by social behavior of bird flocking or fish schooling, PSO (particle swarm optimization) is a population-based search technique which has attracted significant attention to tackle the complexity of difficult optimization problems. This paper studies the performance of different PSO variants for estimating Iran's electricity demand. Seven PSO variants namely, original PSO, PSO-w (PSO with weighting factor), PSO-cf (PSO with constriction factor), PSO-rf (PSO with repulsion factor), PSO-vc (PSO with velocity control), CLPSO (comprehensive learning PSO) and a MPSO (modified PSO), are used to find the unknown weighting factors based on the data from 1982 to 2003. The validation process is then conducted by testing the optimized models by using the data from 2004 to 2009. It is seen that PSO-vc produces more promising results than the other variants, HS (harmony search) and ABSO (artificial bee swarm optimization) algorithms in terms of MAPE (mean absolute percentage error). This value is obtained 2.47 and 2.50 for the exponential and quadratic models, respectively. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.