New Zealand · 1997–2025
The measured emergence of standing capacitance behind consumer connections.
Both ENTSO-E Final Reports on the 2025 Iberian and North Macedonian blackouts read the excess capacitive reactive power as a network term. The Iberian report asks for what was missing: information on load composition. This work builds that record from 29 years of regulatory half-hourly metering at New Zealand’s transmission–distribution boundary, and finds a second source — the demand behind the customer’s connection has itself moved capacitive.
Overnight reactive power crossed from lagging to leading in 2016, nearly a decade before the 2025 events. A first-principles charging calculation puts the demand-side share of that drift in the physical band 75–88%, and the term behaves as a net standing shunt element: present around the clock, scaling with the connections served, moving capacitive by about 230 VAr per connection over 2013–2025. The mandated electromagnetic-compatibility filter in nearly every mains-connected product is advanced as the candidate device layer, as a labelled hypothesis, with the decisive low-voltage measurement identified.
The paper as a page: the hedges in the margin, the figures live rather than printed — hover or arrow-key any chart for its values, open the table behind it, and drag the capacitance assumption in Fig. 3.
Every claim, its supporting evidence and every hedge in-paper; robustness depth and derivations cited out to the extended version.
The complete record: the full measurement-error analysis, the churn, correspondence and contamination screens, each method’s robustness batteries, and the dated regulatory arc.
The web version carries the short version’s words verbatim. A guard
in this repository, paper/VERIFY_PAGE_TEXT.py, diffs the page against the LaTeX
source at token level in both directions, over every section, and fails if a single word drifts.
PROVENANCE.md states what that proves and what it does not.swh:1:snp:ccc51bbf…,
and the Zenodo record pages as published are captured in the Wayback Machine
(paper,
archive).
The DOIs above are the citation; the mirrors are a second place to fetch from when Zenodo is
unreachable, and every file can be checked against the timestamped manifest.Every number and figure in
both versions is computed from public data — Electricity Authority grid metering and
Commerce Commission information disclosures, both CC BY 4.0 — by the notebooks in
replication/. Both tiers are verified to build from a clean copy of this repository.
This is descriptive analysis of public regulatory metering and information-disclosure data. The views expressed are the author’s. No external funding was received. The analysis informs, but does not advocate, a live reactive-power pricing policy question.
