Impact of the COVID-19 Lockdown on the Electricity System of Great Britain: A Study on Energy Demand, Generation, Pricing and Grid Stability

This dataset is published in relation to the preprint titled "Impact of the COVID-19 Lockdown on the Electricity System of Great Britain: A Study on Energy Demand, Generation, Pricing and Grid Stability" which is accepted to the Energies journal. The aim of this study was to assess the effect of the March 2020 lockdown on the electricity system and market. This dataset contains all data used for the analyses and plots presented in the paper which uses Britain as a case study. The dataset primarily contains data from March 2020. However, it additionally has March 2019 data in some subfolders where it was used for comparison in the paper.

This dataset is separated into 4 categories following the structure of the paper:
(1) Demand,
(2) Generation,
(3) Forecast and Grid Stability, and
(4) Pricing.
Please see the README file for more information about the contents, resolution and structure of this dataset. To access any additional data, the Electricity Data Pipeline code presented in our paper can be employed.

The outbreak of SARS-COV-2 disease 2019 (COVID-19) abruptly changed the patterns in electricity consumption, challenging the system operations of forecasting and balancing supply and demand. This is mainly due to the mitigation measures that include lockdown and work from home (WFH), which decreased the aggregated demand and remarkably altered its profile. Here, we characterise these changes with various quantitative markers and compare it with pre-lockdown business-as-usual data using Great Britain (GB) as a case study. The ripple effects on the generation portfolio, system frequency, forecasting accuracy and imbalance pricing are also analysed. An energy data extraction and pre-processing pipeline that can be used in a variety of similar studies is also presented. Analysis of the GB demand data during the March 2020 lockdown indicates that a shift to WFH will result in a net benefit for flexible stakeholders, such as consumers on variable tariffs. Furthermore, the analysis illustrates a need for faster and more frequent balancing actions, as a result of the increased share of renewable energy in the generation mix. This new equilibrium of energy demand and supply will require a redesign of the existing balancing mechanisms as well as the longer-term power system planning strategies.

Kirli, Desen; Kiprakis, Aristides; Parzen, Max. (2021). Impact of the COVID-19 Lockdown on the Electricity System of Great Britain: A Study on Energy Demand, Generation, Pricing and Grid Stability, 2019-2020 [dataset]. University of Edinburgh. School of Engineering. Institute for Energy Systems. https://doi.org/10.7488/ds/2979.