Take England+Wales log daily electricity consumption, detrend using Christiano-Fitzgerald band pass filter, and then regress on seasonal (calendar) terms, and temperature/wind/rain factors (Kirchmaier and de Guana de Santiago, 2016, h/t Simon Kennedy at Bloomberg), through April 2016. Then forecast out of sample; the residual looks like this:
Figure 3 from Kirchmaier and de Guana de Santiago, (2016).
Electricity consumption is way under what would be expected from historical correlations, suggesting a decline in economic — particularly industrial — activity.
While monthly estimates of November GDP are up 1.1% relative to June, industrial output is down by 1.2%, according to NIESR (Dec. 7).
It is always useful to keep in mind that economic statistics are sometimes revised by large amounts.
As if millions of wall warts were suddenly unplugged!