Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Electricity Demand and Load Forecasting

The current COVID-19 pandemic and the preventive measures taken to contain spread of disease have drastically changed patterns our behavior. movement restrictions significant influences on behavior environment energy profiles. In 2020, reliability power system became critical under lockdown conditions chaining in electrical consumption will a long-term effect Unlike previous studies that covered only start period, this paper aimed examine analyze demand data over longer period time with five years collected up until November 2020. paper, analysis based series decomposition process is developed through elimination impact times correlation, trends, seasonality analysis. This aims present show pandemic’s impacts grid demand. indicates stress (half-hourly daily peaks, baseline forecast error) not simple reduction electricity order minimize performance forecasting model, rolling stochastic Auto Regressive Integrated Moving Average Exogenous (ARIMAX) model paper. proposed improve by capturing non-smooth nature creating number future scenarios probabilistic model. outperformed benchmark ARIMAX Artificial Neural Network (ANN) reduced error 23.7%.