Abstract:
The New Zealand government introduced strict containment measures in response to the Covid-19 virus. We assess the impact of containment measures on wholesale electricity demand using the augmented auto-regressive-moving-average model. The Alert Level-4 lockdown had the largest, significant and negative effect on electricity demand compared to other containment level measures. Alert Level 4 resulted in a 15.5 % reduction in wholesale electricity demand. Structural breaks in the data are evident as containment progressed to Alert Level 1.