Human Mobility-Based Features to Analyse the Impact of COVID-19 on Power System Operation of Ireland

COVID-19 non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) are changing human mobility patterns; however, the effects on power systems remain unclear. Previous loads and timings along with weather features are often used in literature as input features in load forecasting, but these may be insufficient during COVID-19. As a result, this paper proposes an analytical framework to assess the impact of COVID-19 on power system operation as well as day-ahead electricity prices in Ireland. To improve peak demand forecasting during pandemics, we incorporate mobility, NPIs, and COVID-19 cases as complementary input features and representative of human behaviour changes. By defining different combinations of these explanatory features, several Machine Learning (ML) algorithms are applied and their performance is compared with the baseline scenario currently used in the literature. Using SHapley Additive Explanations (SHAP), we interpret the best performing model, Light Gradient Boosted Machine, to determine the influence of each feature on the predicted outcomes. We discover that typical load forecasting features still influence ML outcomes the most, but mobility-related changes are also significant. Our finding shows that NPIs impact human behaviour and electricity consumption during times of crisis and can be used in the context of load forecasting to assist policymakers and energy distributors.