Italy raises the Macse storage auction cap to €27,000 per MWh a year
Victoria Shinder1 min readItaly's energy regulator Arera has set the maximum premium for the next Macse storage auction, for delivery in 2029, at €27,000 per qualified MWh per year, up from €22,000 proposed in a July consultation, pv magazine reports. Resolution 332/2026, dated 24 September, attributes the increase mainly to higher benchmark investment costs.
Macse is a pay-as-bid auction for long-term storage capacity. A successful battery receives the premium it bid, fixed for 15 years, in exchange for the commercial revenues it gives up on its committed capacity. The cap is the top of the bidding range, and Arera derives it as the cost of new entry: the annualised cost of a benchmark investment plus fixed operating costs, rounded to the nearest thousand.
According to independent researcher Mario Iovino, interviewed by pv magazine Italy, the cap matters beyond the ceiling itself, because other contract amounts are set as percentages of it: guarantees, the withdrawal schedule, the cap on variable payments and the maximum charge for unavailability. In other words, the resolution also tells bidders how much capital they must tie up and what it costs to leave. What it does not tell them, he notes, is their own floor, the price below which a 15-year fixed premium is worth less than merchant revenues.
What it means
A higher cap does not mean higher winning prices; in a pay-as-bid auction competition sets those. It does raise the stakes of taking part, because guarantees scale with it, and it signals that the regulator accepts battery costs are higher than it assumed in July.