By ESS news
China’s top economic planner and energy regulator have moved to formalize a ‘capacity price’ for standalone energy storage on the power grid, expanding a mechanism originally designed for coal-fired power plants and giving investors a clearer route to recoup fixed costs.
In a joint notification dated January 30, 2026, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) and the National Energy Administration (NEA) said that qualified, self-employed new type of storage projects that support system reliability – and are not built that way mandatory co-located storage for renewable energy sources – can be brought under the framework for pricing capacity on the generation side on the basis of a project list.
The policy defines payments for storage capacity as compensation for “available capacity” (a fixed-cost recovery concept), rather than compensation for electricity actually removed – a distinction intended to stabilize cash flows for assets whose system value is often highest during a small number of tight peak periods.
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