1. From macro timelines to micro levers

NZAu does not say “renewables will fail”. What it shows is that under realistic constraints, the timelines stretch, the required investment balloons, and a decade of slippage is entirely plausible.

Confronting that reality, NZAu does something important: it highlights two levers that still work even when the big central build-out is delayed:

  • Buildings and distributed energy (rooftop PV, batteries, demand-side controls, etc.)
  • Industrial energy efficiency

Put differently, NZAu is not just a story about megaprojects. It is an argument that if the centre cannot move fast enough, resilience and flexibility must be built from the edge. That is exactly where off-grid and distributed architectures live.

2. Buildings and distributed energy are not about “what percentage of total demand”

As discussed in Supplement ①, households, small commercial buildings, and shops do not dominate total national demand. On that basis, it is easy to dismiss them: “They are a small share; the main game is still utility-scale.”

NZAu takes a different view. It focuses less on how big these loads are, and more on their controllability and local impact. At the building level, distributed energy can:

  • Shave peak demand via controllable HVAC, hot water, and storage
  • Provide hours to days of autonomous operation during outages (through local off-grid capability)
  • Respond flexibly to price signals, combining human behaviour and automated control

In other words, the question is not “what percentage of national kWh can they cover?”. It is: how much local damage can they prevent when the central system is stressed, and how much peak load can they take off the grid?

Once you assume that central infrastructure will be late or imperfect, local generation and control at the building level ceases to be a nice add-on and becomes a core element of energy security.

3. Industrial energy efficiency: beyond “efficient equipment”

Supplement ② emphasised that industrial efficiency is one of the most powerful levers in Australia's transition. This does not simply mean buying more efficient motors and drives.

NZAu implicitly points toward three layers:

  • Redesigning processes themselves (e.g. staged heat sources, lower-temperature processes)
  • Flattening load profiles (e.g. shifting operations in time, exploiting night-time capacity)
  • Pairing with local power (rooftop PV on factory roofs, on-site off-grid systems, hybrid thermal solutions)

In that sense, industrial efficiency is really about breaking the assumption of cheap, always-available central power. Once you accept that assumption may fail, you begin to design lines and plants that:

  • Limit the area affected when an outage occurs
  • Can keep critical processes running from local sources
  • Use partial off-grid architectures at the line or cell level

This is exactly the direction we have been pursuing under the themes of “uninterruptible factories”, partial off-grid, and line-level power BCP.

4. The gap between “visible action” and structural change

As noted in the concluding supplement, policies that are easy to see and easy to explain—but barely touch the grid— can be politically attractive while leaving the underlying structure almost untouched.

Typical examples are measures that relabel the existing system without changing who controls what or how the system behaves when stressed. These moves may buy a few years of political breathing space, but they do almost nothing against a potential ten-year delay.

The point is not to dismiss “visible action” outright, but to connect it to structural change.
Buildings, distributed energy, and industrial efficiency are valuable precisely because they can be both: politically feasible and structurally meaningful when designed correctly.

5. Off-grid and distributed energy as pragmatic responses, not ideals

The key message from NZAu is not that renewables are doomed, but that the central build-out will not go as planned. Against that backdrop, off-grid and distributed energy should be seen as:

  • A safety valve when the central system is delayed
  • A way to be on the side that “still works” when the unexpected happens

The off-grid architectures we propose did not start from ideology. They are the result of a long engineering loop: observation → verification → implementation → operation → redesign. Large-scale scenario work such as NZAu simply corroborates, from the outside, the direction we arrived at from the inside.

As the uncertainty of central systems grows, local and partial off-grid approaches become less of a niche and more of a survival strategy: building-level off-grid, line-level off-grid in factories, and portable UPS-based spot protection.