Zhejiang opens its spot market to 2.54 GW of grid-side batteries
Serguey Asael Shinder2 min readRegulators in China's Zhejiang province have opened the provincial electricity spot market to independent grid-side storage, according to a notice issued on 23 September by the provincial office of the National Energy Administration together with the provincial development and reform commission and energy bureau. The attached project list covers 40 installations totalling 2.54 GW and 5.1 GWh.
For now the batteries take part on a self-scheduled basis. Each day an operator decides whether to enter the energy market or the frequency-regulation ancillary services market. Of the listed projects, 28 - 2.13 GW and 4.27 GWh - are in commercial operation and centrally dispatched, which qualifies them for both markets; another six operating projects totalling 0.11 GW and 0.22 GWh may enter only the energy market. Projects currently tied to retail electricity contracts can terminate them through the trading platform before joining. From 1 January 2027 storage moves to price-and-quantity bidding, meaning operators will submit offers rather than simply schedule themselves around prices.
The notice closes one loophole explicitly: projects that are not registered as storage will, in principle, not be dispatched in normal grid operation.
What it means
This is a step in a larger shift. China dropped its requirement that renewable plants build storage in 2025, and pv magazine notes that a capacity price floor for grid-scale storage was set in February. The mandate was widely criticised for producing batteries built to satisfy a permit rather than to be used; a market that pays for energy shifting and frequency response is what turns such a fleet into an operating asset.
The two-stage design is worth noticing. Self-scheduling is gentle - operators respond to prices they can see - and it lets the market operator watch how 2.5 GW of flexible capacity changes price formation before batteries start setting prices themselves. For Europe, where many markets already let storage bid freely, the relevant comparison is revenue stacking: allowing a daily choice between energy and frequency regulation, but not both at once, is a deliberate limit on how much value a single battery can capture. How Zhejiang's prices and utilisation respond before January 2027 will be an early indicator of whether the same model spreads to other provinces.