Renewable Energy during the Pandemic Crisis

In this paper, we studied, for Romania, whether the COVID-19 crisis induced significant changes in the pattern of electricity generation, both as total production and on different sources. We used data concerning the net electricity generation by types of fuels in the pre-crisis period (2006 - March 2020), during the state of emergency imposed in the context of the pandemic (March 2020 - May 2020) and over the state of alert (June 2020 - February 2022). As methodology, we estimated some econometric models with dummy variables applied Wald tests for the hypotheses that, in Romania, the electricity production patterns do not differ significantly in the states of emergency and alert compared to those recordedfor the pre-crisis period. We found that during the state of emergency, if the dynamics were cleared by both autoregressive, seasonal and cyclical effects, as well as long-term trends, then only wind energy increased compared to the normal period (pre-crisis). During the alert period the patterns of electricity production returned to those of the period before the outbreak of the COVID-19 crisis for all generation sources.