Work-from-home, electricity, and water: Evidence from COVID-19 in Qatar
| Author | Bernstein, David H. |
| Author | Cassidy, Alecia |
| Author | Khalifa, Ahmed A. |
| Available date | 2024-08-28T09:53:36Z |
| Publication Date | 2023 |
| Publication Name | Energy Strategy Reviews |
| Resource | Scopus |
| ISSN | 2211467X |
| Abstract | Working from home will be key to mitigating harms from future pandemics and has also been proposed as a way to curtail emissions from commuting. This paper exploits a work-from-home order in Qatar to investigate the impacts of working from home on both electricity and water usage. We deploy quantile methods to analyze the distribution of consumption before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, and find evidence that use was shifted from work to home for both electricity and water. For residential use, increases are largest in percentage terms for the lowest deciles of both the electricity and water distributions. For commercial use, reductions are largest in percentage terms for the lowest deciles of both distributions. Our results have implications for which types of customers policymakers might want to target for governmental aid in future pandemics. Our estimates imply that the overall net impact of the shift from commercial to residential usage was a decrease in carbon emissions of 0.160 million metric tons over the period 2019-2020. |
| Sponsor | This research was made possible by the National Priorities Research Program (NPRP) grants NPRP9-232-5-026 , NPRP12C-0821-190017 , and NPRP10-0131-170-300 from the Qatar National Research Fund (a member of the Qatar Foundation). The statements made herein are solely the responsibility of the authors and not necessarily those of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission or the U.S. Government. We thank the Conservation and Energy Efficiency Department at KAHRAMAA, Qatar, for their support. This paper was presented at the 2022 Allied Social Sciences Association (ASSA) Annual Meeting, Advances in Energy Economics Research on January 8, 2022 and at the Association of Environmental and Resource Economist (AERE) Summer Conference on June 3, 2022. We thank our ASSA discussant, Todd Gerarden, for the detailed feedback. In addition, we are grateful for the comments and suggestions by conference participants, as well as: Dylan Brewer, Massimiliano Caporin, Traviss Cassidy, Shawkat Hammoudeh, Mark Howells, Chris Parmeter, Sonia Yeh, and anonymous referees. |
| Language | en |
| Publisher | Elsevier |
| Subject | COVID-19 Energy SARS-CoV-2 Water Work-from-home |
| Type | Article |
| Volume Number | 49 |
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