What happens to the Electricity Grid during a Lockdown?
With my hometown and family in Italy, I heard first hand the reality of lockdown relatively early on. While France and other countries continued with the misguided belief that the virus wasn’t going to be their problem, Italy was shutting down schools, shops, restaurants and even imposing stringent conditions on how far you could go from your home.
It was not long before the nerdy side of me kicked in. I became curious as to how this massive nationwide change of behaviour was impacting the electricity grid. After some failed attempts to get energy data from utilities, I found the Transparency Platform by ENTSO-E (European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity) that provides an API and real-time data for most countries in Europe. A quick check showed the data was good and I was hooked.
The graphs were so drastic and interesting, even for non-professionals, that we picked it up at Sony as part of our ongoing COVID initiative, which aims to provide insights to cities or government agencies on the social impact of COVID using mobility data, tweets and even google search trends! Given our already broad scope and this new great data we thought, why not incorporate energy too? You can read the full report with more interactive graphs and previous years’ data here.
But just to give you an idea, here is a quick overview of some of the findings:
Load
- Up to 29% drop in consumption (weekly average) after the lockdown.
- 44% decrease in consumption amplitude from weekdays to Sunday.
- Mean load decrease of 5.8GW compared to last year (corresponding to 6 nuclear reactors output).
Generation
The changes in consumption are reflected in the load. Note that Italy has no nuclear generation and a lot of fossil gas as well as a diverse mix of renewables (hydro, solar, wind).
- Cleaner Energy mix: decrease in Fossil Gas consumption by 26% compared to last year, saving 168,000 tonnes of CO2.
Exchange Balance
Italy is a big importer of energy primarily from France and Switzerland. The best way of reacting to a decreased demand is to buy less. And that is what Italy did.
- 75% drop in Exchange Balance imports (the difference between Imports and Exports) and became almost net energy-self sufficient.
If you are curious about which exporting/important countries were most impacted, check out the full report.
How resilient is your country’s energy mix?
When crunching data (including from other countries — not yet published), I was stunned by how well Italy could adjust to this drastic drop in demand simply by stopping importing and reducing its fossil fuel consumption — both options also helping to reduce cost. Furthermore, the renewable percentage drastically increased without causing any major disturbances. Two particularities of Italy’s electricity grid are to be noted:
- The inflexible renewables like solar and wind are being balanced by hydro and gas (as well as imports). No nuclear and little coal is being used for providing the baseload.
- Also, Italy’s ubiquitous smart meters are definitely beneficial as they not only provide better data at multiple points in the grid but also enables better forecasts.
This combination has proven to be a resilient mix that can handle a much higher proportion of renewables than it does during “normal” times. As COVID lockdown loosens up and demand returns, it is clear we can and should increase the renewable percentage of the energy mix by replacing more of the fossil gas with solar and wind. It will not only be environmentally beneficial but it will also reduce the dependency on gas and imports. To keep resilience up even with increased intermittency, we should also invest in pumped storage and batteries as well as Demand Response solutions to shift loads.
Credits
I’d like to thank my lab, Sony Computer Science Laboratories Inc. Paris, to support my curiosity and let me investigate the topic. Also thanks to Giulio Predevello who joined me on this endeavour, without whom I’d probably never have made it particularly far.
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*** UPDATE ***
After the first study on Italy, we analysed 16 other countries in Europe with loads of interactive graphs you can explore here: https://sonycslparis.github.io/COVID/energy-europe.
We eventually decided to aim for a “serious” publication in the prestigious Elsevier Journal for Applied Energy and got this paper published in October 2020 (big thanks to my amazing co-authors Giulio and Pietro for making it happen):
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S030626192031480X
