Coronavirus Causes Electricity Demand To Fall

Individual citizens may be seeing their electricity bills shoot through the roof as a result of all the time they’re spending at home in lockdown. But for countries as a whole, their electricity use is actually going way down.

All of the electricity an individual uses at home pales in comparison to that used by businesses and industries. And new data analysis released today by climate think-tank Ember has found that electricity demand in Europe has fallen almost everywhere in Europe since the Coronavirus lockdowns began – with the notable exception of the U.K.

Every country in Europe has seen electricity demand fall by 2-7% week-on-week, according to the analysis. While this may not seem like a lot, this is actually a very significant fall in the context of electricity demand, where temperature-adjusted changes are normally small. The drop is the most significant in the countries which adopted lockdowns the earliest: Italy, Spain and France.

In Italy the week-on-week fall was 12%, but there was already an 8% impact from the previous week, implying a total impact of 20% over the last 2 weeks. The impact in Italy started early, with falls in electricity demand already in the week of 2 March. Italy has recently tightened its lockdown, meaning even more industry and services will shut down and the impact on electricity demand could even exceed 20%. 

Spain’s electricity demand was down 10% week-on-week and Thursday saw the biggest fall at 16%. Germany’s electricity demand fall accelerated to 6% by Friday as more industries closed down throughout the week. Every country has seen some impact. Poland had daily falls of around 5% from Monday to Friday.

The U.K. has seen one of the smallest impacts so far, with little impact observed until Saturday. The country shut down businesses and issued a stay-at-home order later than other countries in Europe.