he novel coronavirus pandemic has cut power demand by 8% to 9% power in various US markets, with some market regions – New York City, for example – having much more demand destruction, an S&P Global Platts Analytics analyst said Wednesday.”Weather-adjusted load growth was sluggish in 2019, even before we were seeing the coronavirus impacting demand,” said Manan Ahuja, Platts Analytics’ senior director of North American Power, during a webinar entitled, “Demand Destruction in Global Power: How the Dispatch Stack is Faring.” Weather-adjusted average load for the Lower 48 states was down 0.6% in 2019, versus 2017, and so far in 2020, that average is down 0.8% from 2017, according to Ahuja’s written presentation.
“If we take into account the weather, load should have been quite a bit higher,” Ahuja said. “It has been eight to nine percent lower than what we would expect in a world without the coronavirus pandemic.” In New York City, the coronavirus-related load decreases, after adjusting for weather, have been down about 16%, the presentation states. In Washington state, coronavirus-related decreases have averaged about 9% since February 1.
As these declines have coincided with significantly lower natural gas prices, coal’s share of the generation stack has fallen 22.3 average GW so far in 2020, while natural gas’ share has surged 13 aGW, the presentation states. Without adjusting for weather, average daily peakloads for 2020 through Tuesday were down 16.4 GW, or 5%, compared with the same period of 2019, across the seven US independent system operators plus the Bonneville Power Administration, which maintains peakload information for part of the Pacific Northwest. Only in the Electric Reliability Council of Texas is the average daily peakload up, just 529 MW or 1.2%, compared with the same period of 2019.
The biggest absolute and percentage difference among the various power market regions is in PJM, where the peakload has so far averaged just 93.1 GW in 2020, down 7.6 GW, or 7.5%, compared with the same period of 2019.
‘UNPRECEDENTED’ BUSINESS SHUTDOWNS
A.J. Goulding, a nonresident fellow of the Columbia Center for Global Energy Policy and president of London Economics International, said “while mild weather is a factor, the declines are real and COVID-19 related.”
“While there are regional variations, the number of businesses that are shut down is unprecedented, and any moderate increases in residential load from working from home cannot offset the declines in commercial and industrial load,” Goulding said Wednesday.
As transportation has fallen dramatically, cutting oil demand, the entire fossil fuel energy complex has collapsed, with May West Texas Intermediate crude plunging to negative $37/barrel Monday before recovering to roll off trading Tuesday at about positive $10/barrel.