Electricity consumptions of households captures covid response

What is it about?

Understanding how populations’ daily behaviors change during the COVID-19 pandemic is critical to evaluating and adapting public health interventions. Here, we use residential electricity-consumption data to unravel behavioral changes within peoples’ homes in this period. Based on smart energy-meter data from 10,246 households in Singapore, we find strong positive correlations between the progression of the pandemic in the city-state and the residential electricity consumption. In particular, we find that the daily new COVID-19 cases constitute the most dominant influencing factor on the electricity demand in the early stages of the pandemic, before a lockdown. However, this influence wanes once the lockdown is implemented, signifying that residents have settled into their new lifestyles under lockdown. These observations point to a proactive response from Singaporean residents—who increasingly stayed in or performed more activities at home during the evenings, despite there being no government mandates—a finding that surprisingly extends across all demographics. Overall, our study enables policymakers to close the loop by utilizing residential electricity usage as a measure of community response during unprecedented and disruptive events, such as a pandemic.

Featured Image

Photo by @shawnanggg on Unsplash

Photo by @shawnanggg on Unsplash

Why is it important?

It is vital for policymakers to understand how people react during a pandemic. Here, we propose to use domestic electricity-consumption data, which arguably capture peoples’ daily behaviors accurately and dynamically. Considering the city-state of Singapore as a case study, we study over 10,200 individual households’ electricity-consumption patterns to uncover previously unknown behavioral trends during the COVID-19 pandemic.