EQ published a blog post on Tuesday 17 March on the consumption reduction in the European electricity markets due to measures to combat the Corona epidemic. We focused on numbers for Italy, which has suffered most from the epidemic in Europe, and introduced measures which are now being followed by several countries.
Thus we now see more clearly the effect in electricity demand on these national measures to prevent or reduce further infection.
We have made a selection of countries with an observable reduction in consumption. From our data, we see an effect in 11 countries. See the table below for consumption level in the percentage of expected consumption with no Coronavirus.
In general, no reduction was observed during week 10, we saw some downward trend in Italy during week 11, and so far this week the reduction trend is more visible across Europe.
The strongest reduction can be found in Italy, France and Spain, but we see at least a 5 % reduction in most countries. For Germany, we don’t observe any reduction yet based on these numbers, but the reported German consumption data is normally a bit more uncertain than data from other countries.
The chart below covering daily data shows the overall effect of consumption since the start of week 10 for these 11 countries. The overall effect for these countries has so far this week been about 17 GW reduction, which covers the consumption for Austria + Switzerland these days.
As we can see, the consumption effect is already significant. EQ follows the situation closely in the days to come.
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