Purpose– The current challenge for forecasting smart meters electricity consumption lies in the uncertainty and volatility of load profiles. Moreover, forecasting the electricity consumption for all the meters requires an enormous amount of time. Most papers tend to avoid such complexity by forecasting the electricity consumption at an aggregated level. This paper aims to forecast the electricity consumption for all smart meters at an individual level. This paper, for the first time, takes into account the computational time for training and forecasting the electricity consumption of all the meters. Design/methodology/approach– A novel hybrid autoregressive-statistical equations idea model with the help of clustering and whale optimization algorithm (ARSEI-WOA) is proposed in this paper to forecast the electricity consumption of all the meters with best performance in terms of computational time and prediction accuracy. Findings– The proposed model was tested using realistic Irish smart meters energy data and its performance was compared with nine regression methods including: autoregressive integrated moving average, partial least squares regression, conditional inference tree, M5 rule-based model, k-nearest neighbor, multilayer perceptron, RandomForest, RPART and support vector regression. Results have proved that ARSEI-WOA is an efficient model that is able to achieve an accurate prediction with low computational time. Originality/value– This paper presents a new hybrid ARSEI model to perform smart meters load forecasting at an individual level instead of an aggregated one. With the help of clustering technique, similar meters are grouped into a few clusters from which reduce the computational time of the training and forecasting process. In addition, WOA improves the prediction accuracy of each meter by finding an optimal factor between the average electricity consumption values of each cluster and the electricity consumption values for each one of its meters.