New Zealand is planning its grid to manage scarcity better. The harder question — what a renewable surplus should be built into — is going unasked. That question is where we work.
The frame
New Zealand’s energy debate has converged, sensibly, on flexibility: using the electricity the country already generates more cleverly — shifting demand off the winter peak, coordinating distributed batteries and rooftop solar, deferring the next expensive piece of network. The Electricity Authority’s distribution-system-operation work and EECA’s flexibility research both point the same way, and the prize is real: EECA puts around a quarter of national peak demand as shiftable, worth on the order of NZ$3 billion of avoided investment.
That is a scarcity-management agenda, and a good one. But it answers only half of a two-part question — the same two halves named in our own earlier public model, Abundance, Not Scarcity. Manage the scarcity you have; or build the abundance you could. New Zealand is doing the first. Almost no one is doing the second.
The blind spot
Flexibility markets, time-of-use tariffs, demand response, distribution visibility — every live instrument in New Zealand is about the timing of existing demand. Not one asks the structural question: what durable industry should the country build so that a future surplus has somewhere to go? The roadmap even names the failure mode of pure timing — herding, where everyone shifts at once and simply moves the peak rather than removing it.
The question NZ is asking
When should we use the power we already have, so we can avoid building more?
The question Inari asks
What should we build, so that the power we could have has a durable, high-value use?
Flexibility decides when the washing machine runs. It never decides whether the country builds the factory. Those are different questions, and only one of them is being worked on.
Surplus-to-structure
Inari is a surplus-to-structure engine. It takes a jurisdiction’s renewable endowment and asks which large, flexible industries could absorb the surplus as durable structure — processing, cold chain, minerals, data, green fuels — ranked by how much value they keep at home and how honestly they can be built. This is deliberately upstream of the market: it is siting and structural-demand analysis, not dispatch, not trading, not a platform. We are an analyst of the system, not a participant in it.
Others build the marketplace where power is bought and sold minute to minute. We work on the slower question of what the country should build in the first place — and we don’t sit inside the market we’re analysing.
Why this matters more in New Zealand than almost anywhere
New Zealand has no international electricity interconnector. It cannot export a surplus electron the way a European grid can. Flexibility can shift the peak and shave the waste, but it can never sell the leftover abroad. That leaves exactly one way to turn an eventual overbuild into value: domestic structural demand — industries sited to run on the surplus. The islanded grid doesn’t weaken the surplus-to-structure case; it removes the alternative to it.
The sequence, stated honestly
We are not arguing against the flexibility agenda. We are arguing it is the first move, not the last. And the honest starting point is uncomfortable: on our own production-ceiling model, run against New Zealand as it actually is today, the country has no productive surplus at all — it meets its essential and wellbeing needs and then fills only about half of its own resilience reserve. There is nothing left over to structure yet.
So the order is real. Flexibility wrings value out of today’s scarcity. Structural demand is what you build once the country has decided to leave scarcity behind and generate well beyond present levels. The “what to build” question is not urgent because a surplus is here; it is urgent because the decision to create one has a long lead time, and the architecture being set now will decide whether that question ever gets asked.
What could falsify our position (prove it wrong)
The headline win of the flexibility agenda is avoided generation and network — not building. Our case depends on New Zealand eventually building well past today’s generation. If the country succeeds at flexibility and stops there, it stays in the scarcity band longer and the surplus we would structure never appears. Efficiency and abundance can pull against each other. We would rather say so than pretend they always align.
This is why we hold the two as a sequence rather than a rivalry. A country that only ever gets more efficient never has to answer what it is becoming. Flexibility keeps the lights affordable; structure decides what the country is for. Both are needed; they are not the same goal.
Posture (our stance)
Inari’s New Zealand work is independent analysis — not commissioned by any government, network, donor or counterparty, and not a product sold into the electricity market. We publish the model, its constants and its failure modes so they can be checked. Our aim in New Zealand is narrow and specific: to put the structural-demand question — what the country should build with an abundance it hasn’t created yet — back into a conversation that has, understandably, been about timing.
Manage the scarcity you have, or build the abundance you could. New Zealand is doing the first well. We work on the second.
Read the analysis behind this position:
· The New Zealand production-ceiling model — how much energy the country owes its people before it owes anything to industry, and why there is no surplus today.
· Inari on TOP’s Abundant Energy policy — where an abundance-first policy and the engine agree, and where an islanded grid changes the answer.
Scenario, not forecast. Corrections and replication welcome: inari@blackjapan.group