Abstract
The worldwide spread of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 forced most countries to intervene with policies and actions—including lockdowns, social-distancing and smart working measures—aimed at mitigating the health system and socio-economic disruption risks. The electricity sector was impacted as well, with performance largely reflecting the changes in the industrial and commercial sectors operations and in the social behavior patterns. The most immediate consequences concerned the power demand profiles, the generation mix composition and the electricity price trends. As a matter of fact, the electricity sectors experienced a foretaste of the future, with higher renewable energy penetration and concerns for security of supply. This paper presents a systemic approach toward assessing the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the power sector. This is aimed at supporting decision making—particularly for policy makers, regulators, and system operators—by quantifying shorter term effects and identifying longer term impacts of the pandemic waves on the power system. Various metrics are defined in different areas—system operation, security, and electricity markets—to quantify those impacts. The methodology is finally applied to the European power system to produce a comparative assessment of the effects of the lockdown in the European context.
Highlights
The World Health Organization (WHO) first reported a cluster of unknown origin cases of pneumonia on December 31, 2019 in Wuhan, China
The electricity demand the Pandemic month of April 2020 isfor compared with the same period of 2019 for the electricity demand the month of April
The risks for the system are greater in the case of demand increase, a situaThe COVID-19 spread and the consequent socio-economic and health preventio tion in which there may be a lack of redundancy in the generation and greater stress on the protection measures have impacted all the energy and electrical systems
Summary
The World Health Organization (WHO) first reported a cluster of unknown origin cases of pneumonia on December 31, 2019 in Wuhan, China. A direct impact was observable in the alteration of demand in terms of both absolute values and temporal arrangement, affecting both energy consumption and power profiles. Besides this direct impact, indirect effects were related to the market prices and the generation mix [15,16,17]. Many analyses have not investigated weather variations, which could significantly contribute to load variations given the correlation with the power profiles [22] Such effects should be examined before assessing the impact of COVID-19 on demand changes, granting that the shock on the power sector is undeniable.
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