When pandemics impact economies and climate change: Exploring the impacts of COVID-19 on oil and electricity demand in China

Despite all the scientific and technological developments in the past one hundred years, biologic issues such as pandemics are a constant threat to society. While one of the aspects of a pandemic is the loss of human life, the outbreak has multi-dimensional impacts across regional and global societies. In this paper, a comparative regressive and neural network model is developed to analyze the impacts of COVID-19 (coronavirus) on the electricity and petroleum demand in China. The environmental analysis shows that the epidemic severeness significantly affects the electricity and the petroleum demand, both directly and indirectly. The outputs of the model stated that the elasticity of petroleum and electricity demand toward the population of the infected people is -0.1% and -0.65%, respectively. The mentioned results show that pandemic status has a significant impact on energy demand, and also its impacts can be tracked into every corner of human society.