ENERGY SECURITYSpeed and Surprises: Decline and Recovery of Global Electricity Use in COVID’s First Seven Months
The unprecedented plunge in electricity use around the world at the beginning of the global pandemic was tied to shut-down policies and other factors. Surprisingly, the recovery to pre-COVID levels was quite fast and not linked to those same factors.
Global electricity consumption plummeted an unprecedented amount during the first six weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic. Just six months later it had recovered fully. Moreover, factors that were strongly associated with initial declines in electricity use were not tightly linked to its rebound.
That’s what a team of Stanford University and Oregon State University researchers found in a study published online by the journal iScience in January. In April 2020, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, electricity consumption had declined by 7.6 percent across the globe, which was larger and much more rapid than the 7 percent drop seen during the 2008 global financial crisis. Apparent causes of early consumption reductions – like government restrictions on in-person work, schooling, travel and social interaction, as well as declines in personal mobility and economic production – were much less correlated with recovery times. In general, the larger a country’s initial decrease in consumption, the slower it recovered, with the extreme examples being India and Italy.
“Our question was: How is the global electricity system responding to the pandemic?” said Ram Rajagopal, senior co-author of the study and an associate professor in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering at Stanford. “We focused specifically on electricity consumption due to changes in habits and behavior throughout the pandemic.”
A Global Scale
The team of researchers drew their conclusions from a pool of data encompassing 58 countries and regions within countries, 60 percent of the world’s population and 75 percent of global electricity use. The initial decline was usually heavily correlated with the stringency of a government’s lockdown. Due to stay-at-home orders and consequential reduced mobility, residential consumption increased, while commercial and industrial consumption decreased, leading to a net reduction in usage.
Other factors, like geography, were not so strongly correlated. Declines varied among countries in the same continent and among regions in the same country. Nearly every continent saw at least one country’s electricity use decline dramatically and at least one country’s use remain nearly unaffected. In South America, Argentina took a big hit while Chile’s consumption was about the same. In the United States, the Carolinas saw a severe drop, while declines were mild in New England and the Northeast.
Researchers did not expect electricity use to rebound so quickly. Nor did they expect that factors associated strongly with decline would delink from patterns of recovery.
