a cold and frosty morning<\/a> around the country on Monday, with Taup\u014d falling to -5.6\u00b0C and Christchurch reaching -4.7\u00b0C.<\/p>\nMetService said it expected the frosty mornings to continue through the first half of the week, especially across the North Island.<\/p>\n
Meteorologist Devlin Lynden earlier said the cold start was being driven by clear skies and light winds.<\/p>\n
“With calm, clear nights, heat escapes easily into the atmosphere, allowing temperatures to plummet before sunrise. Sheltered inland valleys become even frostier as cold air settles into low-lying areas.”<\/p>\n
While there was another cold start on Tuesday morning, overnight temperatures later in the week should be warmer as northerly winds develop.<\/p>\n
The South Island has also seen frosty mornings, although increasing northerly winds have prevented temperatures from dropping too harshly.<\/p>\n
Those winds should strengthen through Tuesday and Wednesday ahead of a front bringing a change in the weather toward the rest of the week.<\/p>\n
Power demand surges<\/p>\n
Transpower NZ said the cold weather this week was leading to record electricity demand, with Monday’s peak demand of 7141 MW an all-time record.<\/p>\n
Transpower – which is responsible for maintenance and transmission of the electric power grid – said it was working with the electricity sector to increase the amount of electricity that is available.<\/p>\n
“We aren’t anticipating any impact on power supply to homes or businesses.”<\/p>\n
Transpower\u2019s Chantelle Bramley discusses cold snap power demand<\/p>\n
Morning Report<\/p>\n
Speaking to Morning Report, operations manager Chantelle Bramley said the response from power companies has been “excellent” with more generation being offered.<\/p>\n
It wasn’t common for Transpower to issue such notices, Bramley said, with the recent notices the first time this year. she said they had last issued such notices in October 2025.<\/p>\n
As well as the record high on Monday morning, Bramley said demand was also high Monday evening and this morning, too.<\/p>\n
Transpower would be continuing to monitor demand over the coming days but the transmission grid was “in good shape”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Transpower\u2019s Chantelle Bramley discusses cold snap power demand Morning Report Much of the country had a frosty start…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":546838,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-546837","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546837","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=546837"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546837\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/546838"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=546837"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=546837"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=546837"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}