Speed and Surprises: Decline and Recovery of Global Electricity Use in COVID’s First Seven Months

“By September or October 2020, global consumption had recovered. This was surprising, especially because a lot of countries still had restrictions in place. It seems as though changes in electricity use were most tightly linked to restriction levels early in the pandemic, but they decoupled as consumption recovered,” said Lily Buechler, a PhD candidate and one of two lead student researchers of the study.

People likely began to deviate from habits initially adopted by returning to work and school, shopping and socializing more regardless of changes in government restrictions, the researchers think.

Searching for an Explanation
The study considered several factors that could have contributed to the recovery of consumption rates.

“The magnitude of change was not necessarily related to the magnitude of restrictions or mobility changes. That’s what people had expected before, but it turned out those were not the best predictors,” said Rajagopal.

Lower gross domestic product (GDP) seemed to be linked to initial reductions in power use, but not to the rebounds in countries’ power use.

“I think the pattern reflects that the world has changed,” said Siobhan Powell, co-lead author of the study with Buechler. “The pandemic affected the connection between economic activity and electricity use as many people shifted to new ways of working. The different world we found ourselves in during the second half of 2020 was reflected in the relationships in this study.”

India and Italy stood out in their respective regions as having the most severe declines in electricity use, averaging 26 percent at their lowest point in late March. They were also among the countries with the slowest return to pre-pandemic consumption levels. Their average consumption returned to within 5 percent of forecasted use in July. In contrast, power consumption in quick-recovering countries, which usually had a less severe initial drop, recovered before the end of May.

In terms of geographic scope, the study was the largest to examine pandemic electricity patterns. While several previous studies attempted to estimate the effects of the pandemic, most of their data had been limited to countries where data was the most readily available, primarily in the United States and Europe.

Moving Forward
The team sees many future applications for their research.

“It’s actually unusual to have an event like the pandemic that affects so many different countries at the same time. It gave us an interesting opportunity to compare responses among countries that experienced very different COVID-related policies,” said Buechler.

“One of the applications of our study is in preparing for future shocks to electricity systems,” said Powell.

As climate change causes more and more unpredictable phenomena across the globe, it is important that power systems can handle the shock of sudden, sweeping changes in electricity consumption. In order to build resilience to events that may affect grid operation and forecasting, electricity system operators need to understand and anticipate the effects of such events,

“If utilities could make use of what we’ve uncovered here about how electricity consumption changes when things are shut down, they could be better informed about what will happen when things may shut down in the future because of the pandemic or other crises,” said Hilary Boudet, PhD ’10, senior co-author, and associate professor of sociology and public policy at Oregon State.

The researchers hope their work continues to contribute to that understanding. They have released their code and data with the hope that other researchers can use their results to further analyze the pandemic’s impacts on the power system, explained Buechler.

Claudia Mose is a student at Stanford and Science Communications Intern at the Precourt Institute for Energy at Stanford Energy. The article is published courtesy of Stanford News.