New Zealand cut power to thousands of homes across the North Island without notice late Monday.

The outages occurred as record demand coincided with insufficient generation, which resulted in the need to reduce demand to maintain system security. The surge in demand happened mostly due to a sharp drop in temperatures as the country was buffeted by a winter storm.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern wants New Zealand to be generating all of its electricity from renewable sources such as hydro, wind or geothermal steam by 2030. Critics have warned that removing coal or gas-powered plants from the system could expose supply to greater risk of disruption.

There was a “commercial constraint” in the market because Genesis Energy opted to have one of its gas-fired units at its Huntly plant standing idle.

Genesis had believed the unit wouldn’t be needed based on other capacity in the system but there was an unexpected outage at a central North Island plant, then wind generation dropped because of still conditions. That left insufficient power to meet the surge in demand.

Meet your bright future. And this guys only cut around 20% of coal and gas plans for now. They plan to destroy all of them pretty soon.