2020/08/16 by Elizabeth Buechler, Buechler, Elizabeth, Siobhan Powell +17
Environmental Science · Mathematics · #COVID-19 impact on air quality #Energy and Environment Impacts #COVID-19 epidemiological studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2008.06988
Understanding how efforts to limit exposure to COVID-19 have altered\nelectricity demand provides insights not only into how dramatic restrictions\nshape electricity demand but also about future electricity use in a\npost-COVID-19 world. We develop a unified modeling framework to quantify and\ncompare electricity usage changes in 58 countries and regions around the world\nfrom January-May 2020. We find that daily electricity demand declined as much\nas 10% in April 2020 compared to modelled demand, controlling for weather,\nseasonal and temporal effects, but with significant variation. Clustering\ntechniques show that four impact groups capture systematic differences in\ntiming and depth of electricity usage changes, ranging from a mild decline of\n2% to an extreme decline of 26%. These groupings do not align with geography,\nwith almost every continent having at least one country or region that\nexperienced a dramatic reduction in demand and one that did not. Instead, we\nfind that such changes relate to government restrictions and mobility.\nGovernment restrictions have a non-linear effect on demand that generally\nsaturates at its most restrictive levels and sustains even as restrictions\nease. Mobility offers a sharper focus on electricity demand change with\nworkplace and residential mobility strongly linked to demand changes at the\ndaily level. Steep declines in electricity usage are associated with workday\nhourly load patterns that resemble pre-COVID weekend usage. Quantifying these\nimpacts is a crucial first step in understanding the impacts of crises like the\npandemic and the associated societal response on electricity demand.\n