Effects of COVID-19 on electric energy consumption in Turkey and ANN-based short-term forecasting

Due to the coronavirus, millions of people worldwide carry out their work, education, shopping, culture, and entertainment activities from their homes now using the advantages of today’s technology Apart from this, patient care and follow-up are carried out with the help of electronic equipment especially in the institutions where health services are provided It is important to provide a reliable electricity supply for humanity so that people can perform all these services In this study, the outlook of energy in Turkey was examined The current energy consumption and investments were examined Then, the precautions by the government in the pandemic period according to the occurrence and spread of COVID-19 in the country are given in chronological order The actual electricity consumption data were obtained daily across the country, after all these precautions It was observed that electricity consumption decreased significantly, especially on restricted days It is inarguable that energy consumption estimation should be made in the short term so that the energy sector is not adversely affected by this situation In this study, more accurate short-term consumption forecasting methods were developed during the COVID-19 pandemic period: nonlinear autoregressive (NARX) and long short-term memory (LSTM) artificial neural networks (ANNs) Between January and April 2019 electrical consumption data were used to train and validate the forecast prediction The NARX and LSTM are potential candidates for effective forecasting of electricity consumption However, the obtained LSTM results suggest that the proposed method performs better than the NARX ANN © TUBITAK