Covid-19 affects the personal lives of millions and led to an economic crisis. Changed behavioral patterns and a reduction of industrial activity result in a reduction in power demand, and thus Covid-19 impacts the power systems around the world. Bottom-up mapping of the effect of Covid-19 on the energy demand is challenging, if not impossible. In order to analyze the impact of the pandemic on power demand, we instead propose a simplified approach based on an econometric analysis that quantifies the country-wide load reduction of Covid-19, using the number of active cases as well as the specific lockdown period as proxies. The time span covered is from 1 January 2016 to 31 August 2020. This long time span allows us to investigate the effect of Covid-19 on the power demand. We find that in Germany (DE) and Great Britain (GB) the power demand is reduced by about 1–1.7 MW per case, while in France the demand increased by 1 MW per case during times outside of the lockdown. On the other hand, in France the lockdown itself has a much higher load reduction effect in France than in GB and DE. Based on the elasticity of power demand regarding Covid-19 cases, we calculate the impact of Covid-19 on the power prices through reduced loads. We find that Covid-19 reduced power prices by 3 to 6 EUR per MWh. The effect of Covid-19 on carbon emissions in the power sector is likely to be small. In Germany, the country with the highest absolute level, emissions in the power sector were reduced by approximately 2% (4 Mio. t CO2).
Flow-based market coupling provides zonal day-ahead markets with appropriate signals of possible real-time congestions by incorporating information on local load and generation patterns. It relies on predictive parameters, notably the base case and generation shift keys. Also it only monitors part of the grid, through selecting critical network elements. In consequence, it naturally falls short of a nodal pricing-based cost-optimal solution. Based on a test network with three flow-based market coupling zones, we show that the results of flowbased market coupling converge to nodal pricing solutions with an increasing amount of re-configured market zones. We identify if re-configured market zones can help to improve the selection of critical network elements and lead to cost reductions even in the original market zone setting. We find that around 90% of the cost reductions from a market zone re-configuration can be maintained when the critical network elements, obtained from the re-configured market zones, are used for the original market zones. This is a strong indication that, both in reality as well as model-based research of flow-based market coupling, the selection of critical network elements should be based on expected congestion patterns. To find these congestions, we conduct a nodal pricebased market zone re-configuration that helps to identify lines with different congestion signals. This approach can constitute a helpful addition to static and assumption-based selection criteria for critical network elements, such as the often-used zone-to-zone power transfer distribution factors that strongly rely on assumptions like generation shift keys.
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