Quantitative assessment of U.S. bulk power systems and market operations during the COVID-19 pandemic

Guangchun Ruan; Jiahan Wu; Haiwang Zhong; Qing Xia; Le Xie

doi:10.1016/j.apenergy.2020.116354

Quantitative assessment of U.S. bulk power systems and market operations during the COVID-19 pandemic

Appl Energy. 2021 Mar 15:286:116354. doi: 10.1016/j.apenergy.2020.116354. Epub 2021 Jan 30.

Authors

Guangchun Ruan^{1

2}, Jiahan Wu², Haiwang Zhong¹, Qing Xia¹, Le Xie²

Affiliations

¹ Department of Electrical Engineering, the State Key Laboratory of Control and Simulation of Power Systems and Generation Equipment, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China.
² Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843, USA.

Abstract

Starting in early 2020, the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) severely attached the U.S., causing substantial changes in the operations of bulk power systems and electricity markets. In this paper, we develop a data-driven analysis to substantiate the pandemic's impacts from the perspectives of power system security, electric power generation, electric power demand and electricity prices. Our results suggest that both electric power demand and electricity prices have discernibly dropped during the COVID-19 pandemic. Geographically diverse impacts are observed and quantified, while the bulk power systems and markets in the northeast region are most severely affected. All the data sources, assessment criteria, and analysis codes reported in this paper are available on a GitHub repository.

Keywords: COVID-19 pandemic; Data-driven analysis; Electricity market; Impact analysis; Power system.