From Lagging to Leading: The Measured Emergence of Standing Capacitance Behind Consumer Connections, 1997–2025

Both ENTSO-E Final Reports on the 2025 Iberian and North Macedonian blackouts read the excess capacitive reactive power as a network term. The Iberian report asks for what was missing: information on load composition. This paper builds that record from regulatory half-hourly metering at New Zealand's transmission–distribution boundary, spanning 29 years, and finds a second source — the demand behind the customer's connection has itself moved capacitive. Overnight reactive power crossed from lagging to leading in 2016, nearly a decade before the 2025 events, and a first-principles charging calculation puts the demand-side share of that drift in the physical band 75–88%. The term behaves as a net standing shunt element — present around the clock, scaling with the connections served, and moving capacitive by about 230 VAr per connection over 2013–2025. The mandated electromagnetic-compatibility filter in nearly every mains-connected product is advanced as the candidate device layer, labelled as a hypothesis, with the decisive low-voltage measurement identified. Read it in the browser: djhume.github.io/lagging-to-leading — the web version, rendered, alongside both PDFs. Zenodo serves uploaded HTML as plain text, so the copy attached to this record downloads rather than displays; that copy is the preservation form, self-contained and stamped, and opens from a folder with no network. Three reading forms, the same words: short-version.pdf (11 pp) — the reading form: every claim, its evidence and every hedge in-paper. extended-version.pdf (28 pp) — the complete record: the full measurement-error analysis, the churn, correspondence and contamination screens, each method's robustness batteries, and the dated regulatory arc. lagging-to-leading.html — the short version as a web page, with the hedges in the margin and the figures live rather than printed. One self-contained file: no libraries, no network requests, so it opens offline. Its text is diffed against the LaTeX source at token level in both directions by a guard that ships with it. Every number and figure is computed from public data by the accompanying notebooks. The data and code archive is a separate record, 10.5281/zenodo.21927098, whose SHA-256 manifest is anchored via RFC 3161 (FreeTSA) and OpenTimestamps (Bitcoin). Repository: github.com/djhume/lagging-to-leading. Licence: CC0 1.0. The two typefaces embedded in the HTML page are used under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 and are the one part of that file which is not CC0; the notice is in the file and in the archive's README.