Journal of Critical Infrastructure Policy
secure . So that was good . PJM already deploys a continuous , robust spear-phishing campaign , but we stepped that up as we saw more phishing attempts related to the pandemic .
One ongoing challenge is that a lot of collaboration tools are cloudbased . When we need to start enabling collaboration for market-sensitive tasks , it ’ s critical to be very vigilant in terms of security risks . This has accelerated the work of our security and architecture teams . So , truly from an operations perspective , the transition to a remote workforce was mostly seamless . Cloud-based solutions and technologies will now be a big focus for our security team , so we can use those technologies but maintain a strong cybersecurity posture .
Krieg Did stay-at-home orders or other pandemic factors in the various states where you operate impact daily peaks , energy demand or load patterns ?
Asthana All of those things . As industry paused and more people began working from home , power demand moved from commercial to residential customers . Usually that load is about evenly split . That makes a difference in the summer , particularly because residential air conditioning is considerably less efficient . The time of day people were using power changed , because , for example , some of the commute evaporated . And this varied across the footprint , because , as you know , different localities moved with differing degrees to first shut down and then reopen their economies .
In order to try to isolate the effect of pandemic-related behavior , PJM has been analyzing electricity demand by using traditional forecast models to “ back-cast ” expected loads and plugging in the actual temperatures , so that the models ’ forecasts for weather are perfect . Since late March , power demand has dropped about 7 percent from what we would typically expect . On the weekends , the drop is closer to about 3 percent . The most significant peak impacts took place in the first half of May , when power demand was down 11 – 15 percent . As of August , with increased economic activity and somewhat loosened social restrictions , peaks were coming in generally less than 5 percent under what we would have expected . Weekdays continue to be impacted more than weekends for both peaks and energy usage . In general terms , the COVID-19 virus has smoothed out peaks compared to traditional hourly load patterns of late winter / early spring .
Krieg Finally , from your CEO perspective , what ’ s been learned so far by the energy industry as the COVID-19 pandemic continues ?
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