Article Preview
TopIntroduction
COVID-19 (Coronavirus disease 2019), is a novel disease caused by coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 previously known as 2019-nCoV. The disease was first detected in the city of Wuhan, China. It has spread across China and many other countries in just 30 days. On January 30th 2020, the World Health Organization Director General declared the current outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern and on March 11th declared it a pandemic. (World Health Organization, 2020a, 2020b) The first wave of the pandemic, had caused 5,691,790 laboratory-confirmed cases of infection worldwide, including 355,629 deaths, updated on May 27th 2020. (John Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering Center for Systems Science and Engineering [JHU CSSE], 2020).
As a global emergency, the pandemic (later also called epidemic, whenever referred to local level only) already showed an impact on global economies and on related research analyses, even making it develop its own term: Coronanomics (Eichengreen, 2020). Baker et al. (2020) show that this pandemic caused unprecedented powerful impact on United States’ stock market, even more powerful than previous events like the Spanish Flu pandemic. This is explained as that current market is more globally interconnected than before. Another explanation given, is that today’s pandemic (with related countermeasures implemented by countries) caused people to change their daily routines, including labor habits. (Baker et al., 2020; Baldwin, 2020).
Economic trends are also particularly interesting in power systems, as these systems have long been directly linked to monetary and market implications of their architecture and operation. Notable examples of research works that look at this side are (Jurasz & Mikulik, 2017; Robak & Raczkowski, 2018), where authors investigate it from the perspective of recent changes in the generation mix. Other interesting pieces of research in the field of energy economics are (Bhattacharyya, 2019; Toczyłowski, 2002) where authors look at general drivers on energy markets. Given that studies on energy economics and on power systems is nontrivial often mathematical modelling, optimization and simulation approaches are used to make the studies feasible – such as the ones presented by Voropai (2019) or Rodriguez – Aguilar et al. (2020).
Despite the fact that the current pandemic has a global impact, and that ”the virus may in fact be as contagious economically as it is medically” (Baldwin & di Mauro, 2020), little research papers related to its impact on electrical energy markets were published. The existing ones mostly focused on general economic impacts of COVID-19 pandemics, with a special outlook on the energy markets. Ozili & Arun (2020) have shown that the pandemic impacted all branches of economies, including the energy sector through oil prices changes. The theme of oil prices drop is further investigated by Dutta et al. (2020), showing that crude oil prices dropped worldwide. Some more pieces of work focus on the environmental issues of energy sector during the pandemic time. Allan et al. (2020) show that despite the considerable economic slowdown, green energy transformation in the post-pandemic stage is possible and should be performed. Saadat et al. (2020) have pinpointed a positive side of the pandemic – air and water pollution decreased. However, according to Lahcen et al. (2020) this decrease was not proportional to damages in the economies that have occurred. Above pieces of research should be considered valuable, yet do not touch the electrical energy markets directly. Some examples describing electrical energy implications are works by Narajewski & Ziel (2020) and Qarnain et al. (2020). Both of them however focus on very specific power demand problems – first one on changes in its daily patterns and the second on governmental responses to increased household demand. However, we have not identified any paper giving an outlook on general movements in energy systems due to the pandemic.