Energy consumption, from electricity, has always been a direct indicator of economic activity. The confinements imposed by governments all over Europe have had deep and far reaching impacts on industry and people’s lives, and therefore on the amount and the time of energy consumption. Energy data, being available at almost real time, provides us with fine-grained view on the economic and environmental impact of COVID-19.

Our Focus

Our investigation initiated with a series of questions that will drive our data analysis:

• How did the total load change with the imposed confinement measures?
• How does this crisis impact the CO2 emissions?
• How daily load patterns can give an insight into how people’s lives changed?
• How do countries react to a sudden drop of load? Can they use their renewables? Which type of generation source is being cut first?
• How does it impact energy imports and exports from neighbouring countries? Is energy self-sufficiency increased or decreased? How is it linked to renewables?
• How resilient and flexible is our electricity grids when confronted with extreme events or drastic load changes? How does the energy mix contribute to it?
• Which government measures had the biggest impact to the economy? How quickly is the economic activity coming back?

These are just some threads that we will try to unravel in the series of reports to come.

The Data

The data is obtained from the Transparency Platform of the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity (ENTSOE).

The available data are time-series with a 15, 30 or 60 minute resolution depending on the country. We datasets for multiple European countries and years from 2016 to today are used. Notably we are interested in the following time-series:

• Load data
• Day-ahead data (i.e. predictions of the load for the following day)
• Generation data for each type of source
• Cross-country power flows for neighbouring countries (imports and exports)

They were collected according to this diagram (source):

More details on how this data is connected are explaiend here.