Effects of Covid-19 disease on electricity consumption of various sectors in Iran

Abstract

In December 2019, the World Health Organization announced the COVID-19 pandemic. This disease seriously endangers human life around the world and unfortunately, increases the number of infected and passed away people every day. Incidents of this magnitude have a major impact on the economy, energy consumption, and even the environment in a country. Depending on the policy pursued in each country to deal with COVID-19, the impact of this disease on energy consumption varies. In this paper, the electricity consumption situation is investigated in Iran during the pandemic period by using credible online data to articulate the decrease or increase in electricity consumption. It was observed that the electricity consumption in a period of fourteen months of the COVID-19 outbreak in comparison to before the pandemic time for residential, industrial, agricultural, commercial, public utilities and street lighting sectors were variations as 6.8 %, 22.4 %, 7.1 %, 6.1 %, −1%, and −0.3 % respectively. Due to the increase in overall electricity demand in Iran, to confront such problems it is proposed to strengthen the infrastructures of the energy sector by developing a comprehensive energy plan using intelligent systems, provision of appropriate policy and allocating more portion to renewable energy.

Keywords

• Electricity consumption
• Coronavirus
• Lockdown
• Iran
• Energy demand
• Energy policy