The impact of COVID-19 on the Brazilian Power Sector: operational, commercial, and regulatory aspects

Abstract

The Coronavirus outbreak has imposed different levels of stay-at-home orders worldwide to help contain the disease spread, thus promoting severe impacts over the global economy. The World Bank expects 90% of the world economy to go into recession, being this the most severe global economic crisis since the second world war. Consequently, electricity consumption has fallen sharply in many countries, so as in Brazil, what provoked critical effects over many electricity sector stakeholders. In this context, this article discusses the main consequences of COVID-19s outbreak over the Brazilian electricity sector and some measures taken by the government and the regulator to address such issues. Further, this work proposes a long-term electricity demand forecast methodology, taking into consideration bottom-up technics for general demand growth and top-down technics for the expansion of distributed generation in Brazil. The model uses as input economic forecasts from the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and Brazilian market consolidated expectations disclosed by the Brazilian Central Bank. The model proves to be useful to long-term demand forecast by producing results adherent to official forecasts published by Brazilian governmental institutions.