This paper presents an artificial neural network (ANN) approach for annual electricity consumption in high energy consumption industrial sectors. Chemicals, basic metals and non-metal minerals industries are defined as high energy consuming industries. It is claimed that, due to high fluctuations of energy consumption in high energy consumption industries, conventional regression models do not forecast energy consumption correctly and precisely. Although ANNs have been typically used to forecast short term consumptions, this paper shows that it is a more precise approach to forecast annual consumption in such industries. Furthermore, the ANN approach based on a supervised multi-layer perceptron (MLP) is used to show it can estimate the annual consumption with less error. Actual data from high energy consuming (intensive) industries in Iran from 1979 to 2003 is used to illustrate the applicability of the ANN approach. This study shows the advantage of the ANN approach through analysis of variance (ANOVA). Furthermore, the ANN forecast is compared with actual data and the conventional regression model through ANOVA to show its superiority. This is the first study to present an algorithm based on the ANN and ANOVA for forecasting long term electricity consumption in high energy consuming industries. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.