Every country in Europe has seen electricity demand fall 2-7% week-on-week, Romania losing 5%, according to Ember Research for the week 16-22 of March. Italy, Spain and probably France show twice the impact of any other country. UK electricity demand has been least impacted so far.

In Italy, although the week-on-week fall was 12%, there was already an 8% impact from the previous week, implying a total impact of 20% over the last 2 weeks. In addition, Italy imposed further lockdown, meaning even more industry and services will shut down and the impact on electricity demand could even exceed 20%. Last Friday, the Italian utility A2A said that coronavirus was responsible for a 15% fall in electricity demand across the whole of Italy and that the fall was as much as 25% in northern regions of Italy.

In Spain, the weekly impact was -10% on electricity demand, but Thursday saw the biggest fall at 16%. In France, ENTSO-E data stopped on Wednesday, so we can only see falls of 10-13% from Monday to Wednesday.

Germany’s electricity demand fall accelerated to 6% by Friday as more industries closed down throughout the week (no data was reported yet for the weekend by ENTSO-E). The UK has seen one of the smallest impacts so far. Every country has seen some impact – for example, Poland had falls of around 5% from Monday to Friday.