Firms and Households during the Pandemic: What Do We Learn from Their Electricity Consumption?

We analyze the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on electricity consumption patterns. We highlight the importance of decomposing total electricity consumption into consumption by firms and by households to better understand the economic and social impacts of the crisis. While electricity demand by firms has fallen substantially, the demand by households has gone up. In particular, our focus is on Spain where, during the total lockdown, these effects reached –29% and +10% respectively, controlling for temperature and seasonality. While the electricity demand reductions during the second wave were milder, the demand by firms remained 5% below its normal levels. We also document a change in people's daily routines in response to the stringency of the lockdown measures, as reflected in their hourly electricity consumption patterns. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Energy Journal is the property of International Association for Energy Economics, Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

The implicit cost of carbon abatement during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This paper provides novel estimates of the implicit cost of carbon abatement associated with the COVID-19 crisis. We compare that to the costs from renewable investments that would lead to similar abatement. Focusing on the Spanish economy and its power sector, we combine machine learning and simulation tools to construct a precise counterfactual of market performance in absence of the crisis. Results suggest that power sector CO2 emissions fell by 4.13 Million Tons (about 11.5%) during 2020 due to the pandemic, less than half of the actual year-on-year emissions reductions. Investing in renewables to achieve similar carbon abatement would yield an implicit cost of 60-65 Euro/Ton of CO2. Conversely, the pandemic caused a substantial GDP loss in Spain, relative to the extent of overall carbon abatement. The resulting cost of carbon abatement associated with the pandemic thus exceeded 7 thousand Euro/Ton.