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
Thanks to everyone who took part in the Industry Exercise 2026. Your involvement helped test real-world processes, strengthening how we work together, and building capability, resilience and preparedness across the sector.
The 2026 exercise was jointly delivered by the Electricity Authority and Transpower and simulated a major space weather event affecting New Zealand's electricity system. The Industry Exercise 2026 key insights and recommendations report summarises the outcomes and identifies opportunities from the exercise to strengthen sector preparedness and resilience.
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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