Brazil’s energy planning agency registered 6,091 projects totalling 296,807 MW for the country’s first two auctions dedicated to battery storage — a record for any Brazilian energy auction, and roughly 16 times the 18 GW the industry itself had estimated would sign up before the window opened. The two rounds run on 2 and 4 December, and one of them is reserved for equipment with Brazilian content. That single design choice has done more to shape who is bidding than any price signal: over the past six months, Brazil battery storage has stopped being an export market and started being a factory market.
What Brazil Battery Storage Auctions Are Actually Buying
The framework comes from Normative Ordinance No. 136 of 1 June 2026 from the Ministry of Mines and Energy, published in the official gazette two days later. Storage became a standalone electricity asset under Law 15.269/2025, which is what allows batteries to be contracted through a capacity reserve auction at all — the mechanism Brazil has historically used for thermal plants.
Rather than one auction, the ministry wrote two.
| LRCAP 2026 — National Storage | LRCAP 2026 — Storage | |
|---|---|---|
| Auction date | 2 December 2026 | 4 December 2026 |
| Product | Storage Power 2028 A | Storage Power 2028 B |
| Local content | Required — BNDES CFI accreditation, four qualifying routes, minimum 15% domestic content | None |
| Eligibility overlap | Winners of the national round may not bid in the open round | |
Both run under the same commercial terms: 15-year contracts signed with the electricity trading chamber CCEE, supply beginning 1 August 2028, and remuneration through a fixed annual revenue paid monthly and indexed to the IPCA inflation measure. The fixed revenue has to cover investment, grid connection, transmission and distribution use, operation and maintenance, taxes, insurance, decommissioning — and reinvestment, explicitly including replacement battery modules and new compatible inverters.
The Rules That Decided Who Shows Up
The technical requirements are where the auction stops looking like a tender and starts looking like a product specification.
| Requirement | Level |
|---|---|
| Minimum power | 30 MW per project |
| Continuous discharge | 4 hours |
| Full recharge time | Maximum 6 hours |
| Total efficiency | Minimum 85% at the metering point |
| Cycling | Maximum 2 full cycles a day, 366 a year |
| Variable cost | Zero — revenue comes from the fixed payment only |
| Grid-forming | Mandatory for the entire contract term |
| Equipment | New cells and new bidirectional inverters or converters; no prior commercial use, reconditioning, remanufacturing or reuse |
| Configuration | Standalone BESS with its own authorisation, connection and metering — co-located systems are excluded from competing |
| Licensing | No environmental licence needed to qualify technically |
Two of those lines matter more than the rest. The zero variable cost rule means a winning project cannot declare a fuel-like cost to be dispatched, the way a thermal plant does: the developer gets paid for availability and carries the risk of how the system actually uses the asset. And making grid-forming mandatory for fifteen years turns a premium feature into a baseline requirement for every project in the country’s largest storage procurement.
Then there is a 10% discount on the offered fixed revenue for projects connecting at specific grid points the system operator has identified as most in need of storage — concentrated in Alagoas, Bahia, Ceará, Minas Gerais, Paraíba, Pernambuco, Piauí and Rio Grande do Norte. That is the northeast wind corridor and its neighbours, and it is a deliberate signal about where the government wants the batteries.
The local content rule is the one with industrial consequences. Qualification for the national round requires accreditation under BNDES’s CFI supplier registry, which offers four routes and a minimum 15% domestic content threshold. Proof is required before the contract is signed and again before commercial operation begins. The regulation is explicit that accreditation does not oblige a developer to take BNDES financing — but failing to meet the minimum local content can lead to the contract being terminated.
Who Moved In
The result is visible in how suppliers positioned themselves. Shipping finished containers from Asia is now the harder route into Brazil’s largest storage procurement, and the companies with global market share have been buying or partnering their way into Brazilian manufacturing.
CATL announced a strategic partnership with Moura, a Brazilian battery manufacturer, in São Paulo in late August, aimed at joint participation in the national round. The arrangement combines CATL’s systems with Moura’s domestic footprint and, according to CATL’s own release, the support of a second strategic partner holding the number one market share in PCS and inverters in Brazil. CATL says it already holds about 45% of Brazil’s energy storage market, anchored by the Registro project commissioned in December 2022 — the country’s first utility-scale transmission-side battery system, supporting a substation that serves 15 municipalities and roughly 2 million people.
Windey opened an energy storage integration factory in Camaçari, Bahia, in late June — its first overseas storage plant, with design capacity of 1.5 GWh a year serving Brazil and the rest of Latin America. Cell maker Cornex has signed a 1.5 GWh cell supply agreement with Windey, which puts the two Chinese companies in a matched pipeline for exactly the volume the Brazilian factory was built for.
Jinko ESS signed a memorandum with UCB Power, which has plants in Manaus and Extrema and has been in the storage business for over fifty years, to industrialise Jinko’s systems locally. BYD, which already assembles cars in Brazil, is reported to be planning storage battery manufacturing on top of its existing lithium iron phosphate plant in Manaus. Sungrow does not need a partnership to sell inverters into the region, and reports cumulative Latin American orders of 25 GW of PV inverters and 10 GWh of battery storage.
None of these moves is about the December auction alone. The national round is where a developer’s localisation strategy gets tested, and Brazil’s storage pipeline is already counted among the world’s ten largest. A template proven in the northeast of Brazil is a template for Chile, Colombia and Mexico, all of which are drafting auctions with similar local content language.
The Money Behind the Auction
Two separate pools of money are feeding Brazil battery storage, and they are easy to confuse.
The first is the auction itself. The government’s published estimates point to investment potential of around BRL 10 billion, or about USD 2 billion, and annual system savings of roughly BRL 3.2 billion (about USD 630 million) compared with firming the grid with gas-fired plants. Those are the ministry’s own numbers and they describe a procurement of a few gigawatts, not the 297 GW that registered.
The second is concessional financing. On 7 October, Brazil approved its fifth Eco Invest Brasil auction, in which BRL 4.55 billion (about USD 860 million) goes to batteries and storage systems — absorbing 70% of a BRL 6.5 billion envelope covering critical minerals, batteries and electric mobility. The programme allows up to 80% foreign participation and requires at least 10.25% of its innovation fund to go to projects jointly developed with universities and research institutes. One caveat worth noting: the storage allocation is not ring-fenced for grid-scale stationary storage, so the electric-vehicle battery supply chain can apply for the same money.
The obstacles the auction does not solve are fiscal. The Brazilian solar association ABSOLAR puts the tax burden on batteries at 84.8%, against 44.3% for natural gas, and links it to the BRL 7 billion-plus that renewable generators have lost to curtailment — power that was produced and then not used, which is precisely what a battery is for.
What 297 GW Does Not Mean
The headline number needs three qualifiers.
Registration is not qualification. EPE told the market explicitly that registered projects do not automatically qualify; the agency will run technical review first, and only then will the eligible volume be known. The headline figure is a measure of developer appetite, not of what will be built. Those projects are also spread across a country whose grid constraints are real: in a joint technical note published on 30 September, EPE and the system operator ONS set out how they will calculate the remaining capacity available at each busbar, and one finding matters commercially — the assessment is bidirectional. A substation that can absorb a battery discharging at a given power may still lose that capacity, or all of it, if studies show the battery cannot charge there under safe operating conditions.
The contracted volume is still officially undefined. Market expectations pointed to between 2 and 5 GW, equivalent to 8 to 20 GWh at four hours, but no figure has been published. Against the midpoint of that range, the registration book is roughly 85 times oversubscribed, which tells you how much capital is queued up behind a market that did not formally exist a year ago.
And the first Brazil battery storage auction is one auction. ABSOLAR is already arguing that the initial contract should be a starting point rather than a ceiling, and has proposed annual calls reaching 8 GW by 2030. That is an industry association’s position, not government policy.
The Bottom Line: Brazil battery storage auctions drew 6,091 project registrations and 296,807 MW for the country’s first two rounds, a national record, against market expectations of 2 to 5 GW actually contracted. The rounds run on 2 and 4 December, with one reserved for equipment meeting BNDES local content rules, fifteen-year contracts and supply starting August 2028. Projects need at least 30 MW, four hours of discharge, 85% efficiency and grid-forming capability, and they are paid a fixed revenue with zero variable cost. That design is why CATL partnered with Moura, Windey built a 1.5 GWh plant in Bahia, Jinko tied up with UCB Power and BYD is looking at Manaus — and why the auction is a localisation programme disguised as a procurement.
Notes: The auction rules and technical requirements are taken from MME Normative Ordinance No. 136/2026 and from legal and trade analysis of it; the 6,091 projects and 296,807 MW figure is the energy planning agency EPE’s registration result; the 2 to 5 GW contracted range is market expectation reported by trade press, not an official figure, and the government has not published the volume it intends to contract. The localisation deals and market share figures are company statements, including CATL’s own release, and have not been independently verified. The oversubscription multiple, the 16-times comparison against the pre-window industry estimate and the four-hour energy equivalents are our arithmetic from published figures. Registration and technical qualification are separate stages and the eligible volume is not yet known. EVsays did not attend any auction event, has not inspected any project and has no relationship with any company named. See our editorial policy and correction policy.
Sources & Further Reading
- EPE (Empresa de Pesquisa Energética) — “2026 Power Capacity Reserve Auction for Energy Storage: EPE registers record number of projects” — the primary source for the 6,091 projects and 296,807 MW registration result, and for the statement that registered projects do not automatically qualify. The agency’s English news page returned a server error for EVsays at the time of publication, so no link is given.
- ONS — Nota Técnica NT-ONS DPL 0095/2026, “LRCAP 2026 – Armazenamento: quantitativos da capacidade remanescente do SIN” (30 September 2026, PDF, in Portuguese) — the system operator’s methodology and results for the remaining network capacity available to new storage projects, including the bidirectional treatment of discharge and charging limits and the short-circuit constraints.
- Canal Solar — “MME publica portaria com diretrizes do 1º leilão de baterias do Brasil” — the clearest trade account of Ordinance No. 136/2026: the two products, the 30 MW and four-hour minimums, the 85% efficiency floor, the cycling cap, the zero variable cost rule, the grid-forming obligation and the BNDES CFI condition. The outlet also publishes an English edition.
- Cescon Barrieu — “ANEEL opens Public Consultation on the tender notices for the first storage auctions in the electricity sector” — the legal analysis behind the autonomous-BESS requirement, the exclusion of co-located systems, the newness requirement for cells and converters, the reuse exemption for civil works and auxiliary equipment, and the grid-forming and connection requirements.
- Energía Estratégica — “Brazil looks beyond its first BESS auction” — the market expectation of 2 to 5 GW contracted, ABSOLAR’s proposal for annual calls reaching 8 GW by 2030, the 84.8% tax burden on batteries against 44.3% for gas, and the BRL 7 billion-plus in curtailment losses.
- Rio Times — “Brazil Battery-Storage Auction Draws Record 296,807 MW” — the official investment estimate of around BRL 10 billion (about USD 2 billion) and annual system savings of about BRL 3.2 billion (about USD 630 million) against gas-fired alternatives, and the 18 GW pre-window industry estimate.
- Canal Solar — “With an eye on LRCAP, global manufacturers are advancing the nationalization of batteries in Brazil” — the CATL–Moura and Jinko–UCB Power arrangements, UCB Power’s plants in Manaus and Extrema, and the role of BNDES credit lines in the localisation decision.
- CATL — “CATL Announces Local Partnership, Showcases Full-Chain Storage at The Smarter E South America 2026” (25 August 2026) — the manufacturer’s own account of the Moura partnership, the 45% Brazilian market share claim, the Registro project, and the second PCS and inverter partner.
- Lexology — “Brazil Advances Battery Storage Integration Through New Capacity Auctions” — the four CFI accreditation routes and the 15% minimum local content threshold, the 10% location bonus and the list of qualifying states, and the early commercial operation provision. The site returned an access error for EVsays at the time of publication, so no link is given.
- EVsays — Saudi Arabia’s First Grid Batteries Broke Ground — the first-time national storage tender that Gotion took six of eight gigawatt-hours from, and the same arithmetic on system pricing used here.
- EVsays — India Needs 27 Times More Big Batteries Than It Has — another emerging market where the approved volume is a fraction of the stated requirement.
- EVsays — Long-Duration Energy Storage: Hithium’s First Heze Export Heads to Israel — on why four-hour assets are the default and what changes when a container is specified for it.
- EVsays — Grid-Scale Battery Storage: An 850 MW Shock Absorber and a 30-Year Cell — the two kinds of grid storage asset and what each is paid for, which is the same distinction the Brazilian auction is drawing.
