Demand Response: The Energy Lever New Zealand Can No Longer Afford to Ignore

By: Vic Crockford

Date: 17 September 2026

This year’s Climate and Business Conference pointed to two trends keeping business leaders awake at night: electricity demand is growing, and climate change-related volatility is growing right alongside it. 

The other theme that came through clearly is that New Zealand needs the tools to manage cumulative risk - not just one-off events, but the ongoing, compounding risk to our quality of life (geopolitics causing the most hairs to raise on the back of necks). 

The insight underneath that for the energy sector was that a just-in-time approach to building out our energy sector will not meet unplanned demand, will not respond adequately to rising volatility, and will not manage cumulative climate risk.  

Tracy Hickman of Genesis Energy spoke to how close the margins already are: on 7 August 2026, New Zealand came within a hair's breadth of the capacity of our energy system. Good system management has got us through so far, but as the economy electrifies, we are going to meet more of these near-miss moments, not fewer. And the ability to respond to demand in real time will only become more critical. 

We absolutely need a strong backbone in our energy system. But alongside it, there is a growing and justified call for demand response to enter the conversation in a more meaningful way.  

Demand response isn't a new idea. New Zealand has had the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority (EECA) thinking about demand as a lever in our energy system for years. What I have observed changing consistently in the last year is the level of focus on it, paired with the ever-improving technological capability now available to act on it.  

There is far more opportunity to use demand response to meet growth that new generation and central supply won't be able to match on their own, and to respond to volatility that is, by definition, real-time - the kind of disruption that can't be planned for and doesn't show up cleanly in long-term forecasting models. 

That's exactly where demand response earns its keep for the stewards of the energy system and for people’s daily lives. Technologies that manage the load of electricity can respond in real time to changes in weather, to changes in people's habits, and to unplanned spikes in demand, taking load off the grid exactly when it's needed. 

A lot of the technology is now plug-and-play, but where we’re stuck is winning hearts and minds.  

A trust issue as much as an engineering issue. 

Every one of the shifts above - growing demand, rising volatility, cumulative risk, new technology - is also a positioning, regulatory, and public-trust problem. Demand response only works at scale if households, businesses, regulators, and communities understand what it is, trust it, and are willing to participate in it. 

This requires a truly integrated approach to government relations, public relations, and the design of customer propositions. 

In Aotearoa New Zealand, regulation, public funding, and policy settings shape almost every sector, but almost none more so than in the energy sector. The interconnectedness of all the moving parts – both physically and in terms of regulation – means that the design of demand response communications is constantly operating across government, regulator, and public audiences.  

Taking an integrated approach to how we socialise and position demand response will be critical to its long-term success as a genuine lever in the push to decarbonise and shore up our energy security. The organisations that get ahead of that - that treat the public and policy conversation as part of the product, not an afterthought to it - are the ones who will convert this moment of momentum into a lasting advantage. 

Where Heft fits 

This is precisely the kind of interconnected challenge we're built for: strategists who also produce the deliverables, working across government, corporate, and community audiences at once. We help energy sector organisations design the public-trust and regulatory groundwork alongside the technology rollout - not after it - so demand response propositions land with the people and institutions whose buy-in determines whether they scale.