Originally published on the Rocky Mountain Institute’s website. By Chris Nelder
Before the coronavirus pandemic hit, demand for electricity had already been flat or declining on most utility grids in the United States for a decade. But with 297 million people — 90 percent of the US population — now under “shelter in place” or “stay at home” orders, the load on utility systems is declining even more. And that creates a significant challenge for the US utility sector, whose business model is essentially based on growth. Fortunately, the need to decarbonize our economy presents new opportunities to increase electricity demand beneficially. And doing that — particularly by electrifying transportation — has never been cheaper or easier to do than it is now.
Over the past several years, policy recommendations for combating climate change have started to converge around a prescription to “electrify everything,” including transportation, space heating and cooling, water heating, and cooking appliances. This is because energy transition — shifting energy demands from individual devices that directly burn oil products and natural gas to the power grid — creates a pathway to decarbonizing everything: As we decarbonize grid power by replacing fossil-fueled power plants with wind, solar, and other renewable generators, we decarbonize everything that uses that power.
Electrifying everything would obviously increase demand for power. But we wondered: Does the decline in grid power demand create a new opportunity to accommodate these new loads?
Crunching the Numbers on the Changing Demand
We crunched the numbers on the average hourly load on six of the largest wholesale electricity markets (ISOs and RTOs) in the United States, to see how demand changed week by week since we started staying home. All six of these markets showed three consistent trends. First, total electricity demand clearly fell over the course of the four weeks we analyzed, which would be consistent with reduced business activity. Second, the daily curve of power demand in each market flattened somewhat, with the recent load curves showing less difference between the peaks and valleys than they did before the lockdown orders. The reason for this is not immediately clear, but flatter load curves are easier for utilities to manage, so they result in lower costs to customers. And third, the overall load curves for each system shifted slightly, with the morning and evening peaks occurring slightly later in the day in the fourth week than in the first. This could be an effect of people simply shifting their activities to later in the day during the lockdown than before it.
To validate our findings and test the possibility that system load declined during our study period simply because it spanned the turn of the season from winter to spring, we checked the 2020 data against the equivalent weekly data for 2019. We found a consistent load drop from 2019 to 2020 in all of the systems except for California. This could be because a significant number of infections, and a statewide lockdown order, arrived later in California than in some other states. The electricity market in the state with the most infections, New York, evidenced the clearest week-by-week decline in power demand of the six grids we studied.
The most significant observation we can make, however, is simply that power demand fell significantly during the outbreak, both week-over-week during our study period, and year-over-year. Which raises the question: Will power consumption return to pre-pandemic levels when the pandemic is past us?
It’s clearly too soon to answer that question, since the US infection rate has yet to peak. We don’t know how extensive the damage to the US population and economy will be from this pandemic. But given the extent of lost jobs, and the millions of US businesses that have announced layoffs or furloughs, it may be years before the US economy and electricity demand recover to their pre-pandemic levels.
Continue reading here... https://cleantechnica.com/2020/05/14/we-should-drive-evs-to-use-extra-electricity-capacity/