Novel Demand Forecasting and Reliability Enhancement Approaches for Electrical Grids in Response to COVID-19 Pandemic

由于众多快速变化和未知的变量，COVID-19大流行加剧了电力公司在正常系统运行和应急响应方面的挑战。对于系统的正常运行，不断变化的社会经济模式和不断变化的消费地点和时间将显著改变客户的能源消耗。这需要对能源需求有新的认识，以提高发电、调度和监管的效率。在应急响应方面，COVID-19造成的隔离、劳动力中断和旅行限制严重影响了传统应急计划的有效性。为应对上述技术挑战，这一伙伴关系的目标是开发创新方法，用于能源需求预测和提高电网可靠性，以应对COVID-19大流行。具体而言，将分析2019冠状病毒病大流行对能源需求预测的影响，并在此基础上分别针对大流行时期和大流行后时期开发新的短期和长期需求预测方法。研究新冠肺炎疫情对电力系统运行可靠性的影响，提出主动机组调度策略，提高电力系统运行可靠性，降低新冠肺炎传播风险。

The COVID-19 pandemic has escalated the challenges for electric utilities, in both normal system operation and emergency response, due to numerous fast-changing and unknown variables. For normal system operation, the changing socioeconomic patterns and shifting consumption locations and timings will significantly change customer energy consumption. This requires a new understanding of energy demand to improve the efficiency of generation, dispatch, and regulation. For emergency response, the quarantines, workforce disruptions, and travel restrictions caused by COVID-19 have significantly affected the efficacy of conventional contingency plans. To address the aforementioned technical challenges, the goal of this partnership is to develop innovative approaches for energy demand forecasting and grid reliability enhancement in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, the impacts of COVID-19 pandemic on energy demand forecasting will be analyzed, based on which novel short-term and long-term demand forecasting methods will be developed for pandemic and post-pandemic periods, respectively. Also, impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the operational reliability of power systems will be investigated, and an active crew dispatching strategy will be proposed to improve reliability of power system operation with reduced risks of spreading COVID-19. The partner organization, RUNWITHIT (RWI) Synthetics Inc., has long-term experience in developing synthetic modelling environments to enable innovative decision makers to tackle the most complex and critical issues with major applications in energy and telecommunication industries. In collaboration with Electric Power and Research Institute (EPRI) and local electric utilities in Edmonton, AB, Canada, RWI Synthetics Inc. will leverage the research outcomes to enhance their synthetic modes, which are expected to advantage all types of Canadian electric utilities and technology suppliers through intelligent decision making during the COVID-19 pandemic and in the post-COVID-19 future.