System security and resilience
Industry Exercise
An annual simulation exercise for electricity market participants to rehearse and reinforce processes and communications for managing and responding to a major power system event.
Overview
The Industry Exercise will take place on 20-21 May 2026 and simulate a hypothetical space weather event. We recommend all generators, lines companies, direct connect industrial customers and retailers take part to in the exercise:
- practise operational and communications processes for a major unexpected event in a safe, structured environment
- get familiar with System Operator processes and communications
- identify opportunities to strengthen how we work together during a major power system event.
Timeline
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9 April 2025
Exercise —Industry Exercise 2025 - rolling outages
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4 & 18 March 2025
Event —Rolling outages process and preparing for the Industry Exercise
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Project background
The Electricity Authority and Transpower committed to annual industry exercises after the grid emergency on 9 August 2021 that caused a significant power outage affecting more than 34,000 households in New Zealand.
Exercises aim to confirm, and build trust and confidence in, the industry’s ability to appropriately manage an unexpected major power system event and minimise the impact on New Zealanders.
The first exercise was run in 2022 and has continued annually. It's an important opportunity for electricity market participants to test and rehearse processes for managing and responding to an unexpected event and to identify and action improvements to incident response.
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