Impact of COVID-19 on Ontario’s electricity market: Load, generation, emissions

The COVID-19 outbreak not only threatened global health, it has also –affected the energy markets around the world. This paper studies the impact of the pandemic on Ontario’s electricity market assessing the demand and supply balance over three distinct periods: pre-pandemic, start of the pandemic and during the period 2020–2021. The paper also evaluates the contribution of work-from-home and other mandates in reducing GHG emission. Furthermore, the impact of such rare events is studied on load forecasting. Our analysis shows that although demand dropped by 12% during the beginning of pandemic, it started rising to levels higher than the previous years. Consequently, due to the changes in the daily load profile, primarily due to the changes in consumers’ behavior, the emissions declined significantly during the lockdown and increased afterwards. Finally, this paper provides a short-term Feed Forward Neural Network (FFNN) model to predict future demand. The model performance was evaluated during the three distinct periods and showed high accuracy even in the initial stages of the pandemic: MAPE of 3.21% pre-pandemic, 13.86% beginning of pandemic and 4.23% during pandemic.