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| Fig. 1: Pandemic stay-at-home graffitti. (Source: Wikimedia Commons) |
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way our society operates. Many employees haven't stepped into their offices since March 2020, states have enforced quarantine regulations, and there doesn't seem to be a clear end in sight.
Energy use has been affected by the pandemic as well. Even though it would be simple to think with people staying home and traveling less, energy use would go down, it is not that simple. Some sources of energy consumption have gone down, but other sources have increased. Energy consumption has changed in terms of allocation. To show another example of how the allocation of resources changed from the beginning of the pandemic we can look at the allocation of consumer goods such as toilet paper.
In March when COVID-19 first hit the United States, there was one household item that people couldn't seem to get enough of. Supermarkets around the country were sold out of toilet paper. You would think that the pandemic was gastrointestinal rather than respiratory. Part of the reason this shortage of toilet paper took place is because people were ordered by the government to stay at home. They were no longer going into their offices or going to the store to do their business. Residents couldn't get the toilet paper at home, but I am sure their empty offices were well stocked. This comical example of the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic has similarities to overall energy use since March 2020. Overall energy use is down, especially in sectors such as airline fuel consumption, but residential energy consumption has increased.
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| Fig. 2: Transport fuel consumption, showing a pronouced dip in April 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The data plotted are the sum of Tables 3 and 5 of the EIA Petroleum Market Monthly for November 2020. [1] (Source: S. Harrington) |
States first started to enact Stay at Home Orders in March 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic started to hit the United States. Additionally, as illustrated in Fig. 1, there has been social pressure to stay at home even if the government isn't forcing people to be immobile. From February 2020 to April 2020, the price of crude oil fell from $54 bbl-1 to $21 bbl-1. [1] This two-month drop was likely caused by a decrease in demand for oil as people stopped flying around the country and transportation decreased. As seen in Fig. 2, gasoline and airline fuel consumption saw their demands decrease significantly after the pandemic hit. Gasoline consumption rebounded well after lows in April 2020, but airline fuel didn't see a similar recovery. As seen in Fig. 3, the price of oil hasn't recovered to its pre- pandemic levels. The current price of oil can partially be attributed to airlines consuming less fuel than they were before the pandemic.
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| Fig. 3: Crude oil and petroleum product wholesale prices. [1] (Courtesy of the EIA.) |
As previously mentioned, energy consumption has increased in some areas, one of them being residential energy consumption. Hourly smart reader data in Texas has shown a 16% growth in residential energy consumption during work hours. [2] A reason for this could be employees have been working from home and need to power their own electronics. Additionally, monthly utility data has shown a 10% increase in overall residential energy consumption during Q2 2020. [2] This pandemic has undoubtedly changed the way our society consumes energy. At first glance, it is easy to conclude that energy use is down because people are staying put, but some areas, such as utilities, have seen an increase in consumption.
© Scooter Harrington. The author warrants that the work is the author's own and that Stanford University provided no input other than typesetting and referencing guidelines. The author grants permission to copy, distribute and display this work in unaltered form, with attribution to the author, for noncommercial purposes only. All other rights, including commercial rights, are reserved to the author.
[1] "Petroleum Marketing Monthly - November 2020, November 2020.
[2] S. Cicala, "Powering Work from Home," Tufts University and NBER, October 2020.
