From Lockdowns to Red Lights: Behavioural Shifts and Structural Breaks in Electricity Demand in New Zealand
Mingjing Dong, Le Wen, Mingyue Selena Sheng, Yayu Gao, Daniel Sloot, Kristin Limbach, Wolf Fichtner · 2026
Read From Lockdowns to Red Lights: Behavioural Shifts and Structural Breaks in Electricity Demand in New Zealand by Mingjing Dong, Le Wen, Mingyue Selena Sheng, Yayu Gao, Daniel Sloot, Kristin Limbach, Wolf Fichtner (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/PMC13626151.txt.
Description
Mingjing Dong and colleagues trace how New Zealand's COVID-19 rules bent the nation's electricity demand. Across nearly three years the country moved from an alert level system to a traffic light framework. The team modeled daily demand from late February 2021 to the end of July 2023. Their time-series model, backed by break tests, tied each policy stage to a change in power use against the expected path.
The lightest alert stage came with a three percent rise in demand. The strictest red light phase came with a drop of about two and a half percent. Most other stages showed no clear effect. Break tests confirmed shifts at two stages, and demand drifted down once rules ended, with daily and weekly rhythms reshaped. Grid planners can borrow the method for the next disruption.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Mingjing Dong, Le Wen, Mingyue Selena Sheng, Yayu Gao, Daniel Sloot, Kristin Limbach, Wolf Fichtner |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 59 KB |
| LICENSE | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |