In deregulated electricity markets the independent system operator (ISO) oversees the power system and manages the supply and demand balancing process. In a typical day the ISO announces the electricity demand forecast for the next day and gives participants an option to prepare offers to meet the demand. In order to have a reliable power system and successful market operation, it is crucial to estimate the electricity demand accurately. In this paper, we develop an hourly demand forecasting method on annual, weekly and daily horizons, using a linear model that takes into account the harmonics of these variations and the modulation of diurnal periodic variations by seasonal variations. The electricity demand exhibits cyclic behavior with different seasonal characteristics. Our model is based solely on sinusoidal variations and predicts hourly variations, without using any climatic or econometric information. The method is applied to the Turkish power market on data for the period 2012-2014 and predicts the demand over daily and weekly horizons within a 3% error margin in the Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) norm. We also discuss the week day/weekend/holiday consumption profiles to infer the proportion of industrial and domestic electricity consumption. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.