The Impact of Electricity Consumption During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic impacted several sectors of the economy, including the Brazilian electricity sector. Motivated by the considerable changes in energy consumption behavior in Brazil during the pandemic, the present study conducts an application of several statistical models to quantify the impact of restrictive measures imposed by the government on energy consumption throughout the country. In this way, monthly forecasts of electricity consumption over the year 2020 were generated by considering two scenarios: the actual pandemic scenario and a hypothetical, counterfactual scenario in which the pandemic did not take place. The study used electricity consumption data in Brazil extracted from the Brazilian energy research company (EPE). Forecasts in the counterfactual scenario were generated using exponential smoothing methods and hierarchical reconciliation. The differences in consumption between the two designs were then computed and compared against two indexes published by the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker: the stringency index and the risk of opening the economy. The correlation results suggest that restrictive measures affected consumption in some regions and classes more than others. In particular, the Northern and Northeastern regions were more likely to be more affected by the adoption of restriction measures, along with commercial consumption. Implications are further discussed.