Indirect Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Natural Gas Consumption by Commercial Consumers in a Selected City in Poland

Abstract

In March 2020, a lockdown was imposed due to a global pandemic, which contributed to changes in the structure of the consumption of natural gas. Consumption in the industry and the power sector decreased while household consumption increased. There was also a noticeable decrease in natural gas consumption by commercial consumers. Based on collected data, such as temperature, wind strength, duration of weather events, and information about weather conditions on preceding days, models for forecasting gas consumption by commercial consumers (hotels, restaurants, and businesses) were designed, and the best model for determining the impact of the lockdown on gas consumption by the above-mentioned consumers was determined using the MAPE (mean absolute percentage error). The best model of artificial neural networks (ANN) gave a 2.17% MAPE error. The study found a significant decrease in gas consumption by commercial customers during the first lockdown period.