Between 18 and 25 March 2020 Chile declared a Constitutional State of Catastrophe Exception, closed shopping centres, imposed a curfew from 22:00 to 05:00 and ordered full quarantine in seven districts of the Metropolitan Region. This document, dated 20 April 2020, answers with data a question of the moment: how much, and in what way, the country's electricity consumption changed as a result of those measures.
The measurement uses the more than 2,500 free-client withdrawals in the National Electrical Coordinator's Transfer Balance for March 2020, cross-checked against Internal Revenue Service records to classify them by economic sector.
How far demand fell
Comparing the first week of March with the second week of April, system demand fell by an average of 800 MW, equivalent to a drop of close to 10% in electricity generation relative to early March. The last two weeks of March were equivalent to national volumes seen in 2017: in consumption terms, a working day looked like a pre-quarantine weekend.
Which sectors contracted
- Building and condominium administration, the hardest hit, with a reduction of around 40%.
- Transport, with declines at Metro (-30%) and Buses Metropolitana (-32%), while in telecommunications the effect was mixed: Entel (-1.32%), Claro Chile (+2.6%), WOM (-3.11%) and Telefónica del Sur (+4.9%).
- Financial intermediation and education, homogeneous across firms. In mining, by contrast, a slight increase was detected, not uniform across operations.
The hourly pattern and the generation mix
With retail closing at 18:00 and the curfew at 22:00, the daily curve changed shape: a peak between 13:00 and 14:00, a sharp fall from 16:00, and a new very brief peak at 20:00. Unlike China, Germany and the United Kingdom, lower demand was not accompanied by a cleaner mix: hydroelectricity fell by close to 40%, thermal generation remained relatively constant and, according to the National Energy Commission, coal rose 7.6% in March relative to February, with a combined increase of 5.5% in natural gas and LNG.