Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Electricity Demand and Load Forecasting

Abstract

The current COVID-19 pandemic and the preventive measures taken to contain the spread of the disease have drastically changed the patterns of our behavior. The pandemic and movement restrictions have significant influences on the behavior of the environment and energy profiles. In 2020, the reliability of the power system became critical under lockdown conditions and the chaining in the electrical consumption behavior. The COVID-19 pandemic will have a long-term effect on the patterns of our behavior. Unlike previous studies that covered only the start of the pandemic period, this paper aimed to examine and analyze electrical demand data over a longer period of time with five years of collected data up until November 2020. In this paper, the demand analysis based on the time series decomposition process is developed through the elimination of the impact of times series correlation, trends, and seasonality on the analysis. This aims to present and only show the pandemic’s impacts on the grid demand. The long-term analysis indicates stress on the grid (half-hourly and daily peaks, baseline demand and demand forecast error) and the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the power grid is not a simple reduction in electricity demand. In order to minimize the impact of the pandemic on the performance of the forecasting model, a rolling stochastic Auto Regressive Integrated Moving Average with Exogenous (ARIMAX) model is developed in this paper. The proposed forecast model aims to improve the forecast performance by capturing the non-smooth demand nature through creating a number of future demand scenarios based on a probabilistic model. The proposed forecast model outperformed the benchmark forecast model ARIMAX and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and reduced the forecast error by up to 23.7%.

Forecasting and Modelling the Uncertainty of Low Voltage Network Demand and the Effect of Renewable Energy Sources

“…The ten houses' demand curves for the same day (working day) are presented in Figure 10. In general, the household demand curves for the ten houses show similar behavior with two main peaks in the morning and evening, popular behaviour for household demands [17,23]. However, a wide deviation between the demand curves at the same time is shown in Figure 4.…”

“…The research has only discussed and investigated aggregated demand in Jordan at high voltage [23] or national level [24][25][26][27], and to the best of the author's knowledge there are no studies discussing low voltage or household demands. In Jordan, the peak demand at high voltage level shows significant seasonal variations a with two-peak pattern, where the peak demand mainly occurs during the hot summer and cold winter days due to the increase in use of air conditioning and electrical heaters [23]. In [25][26][27], yearly forecast models for Jordan's national demand are presented using, for example, Least Squares Method [25], ANN [26] and ARX [27].…”

“…In addition the higher number of observations for hourly PV power output was (0-0.25) kW when temperature was equal to (12.5-20) °C. For the PV system, the higher power output (2-2.5) kW occurred when the temperature was equal to (20)(21)(22)(23)(24)(25) °C. This was expected as the rated (designed) power output of PV is generated when temperature is 25 °C.…”

“…A detailed demand analysis for this level of aggregated demand is presented and discussed in [23]. Therefore, the following analysis aims to investigate the cycle or pattern on a daily and hourly basis which was not discussed in [23]. Figure 11 presents the total demand patterns related to the days of the week at Madaba city.…”

The impact of COVID ‐19 on the electricity demand: a case study for Turkey

“…They also made a quantitative evaluation of the economic and environmental impacts of partial and full lockdowns. 28 29 The previous studies emphasize the importance and necessity of energy forecasting to help electricity companies manage their resources effectively and ensure a safe electricity supply to the end-user during the pandemic. Although previous studies have examined various effects of epidemic-like emergencies, research on the impact of the epidemic on the electricity sector is still needed due to the different severity of the epidemic in different countries.…”