Impact of COVID-19 on Residential and Non-residential Power Consumption: A Data-Driven Study

In the past few years, the COVID-19 pandemic has affected all aspects of people’s daily life. In particular, people in large cities have also been greatly affected. How to accurately and timely evaluate and analyze the impact of COVID-19 on large cities in China is increasingly significant. Based on the four-year power consumption data of a large city in China, this paper examines COVID-19’s impact from the perspective of residential and non-residential power consumption.To address the discrepancies in climate and date information, we created COVID-19-Power, a framework that predicts the predicted power consumption of the city in 2020 without the outbreak of COVID-19, and then analyzes the difference in power consumption between the real situation and predicted results. For residential power consumption, we analyze the respective users’ behavior citywide, in different districts, and with different historical power consumption habits clustered by the K-means algorithm. On the other hand, for non-residential consumption, we analyze the users citywide, in different regions and industries. The results showed that while the impact of the pandemic on resident power consumption has been small, it is significant for non-residential power consumption, which is independent of geographical location. The regional differences were mainly reflected in the main types of industries. Through these research results, we can understand in detail the impact of the pandemic on residents’ lives and industries in China’s large cities; Power enterprises can more precisely understand the impact of the pandemic on electrical load, so that power enterprises can adjust power supply strategies more effectively and pertinently.