Ambiente Schedules a 750 MW Battery Leilão for 29 June Reveal — Município Revenue-Share Becomes the Scoring Criterion

The Ministério do Ambiente e Energia will release the full architecture of a 750 megawatt battery storage leilão on Monday 29 June, the date Environment and Energy Minister Maria da Graça Carvalho also opens public consultation on Portugal's Estratégia Nacional para o Armazenamento de Energia. The minister set the calendar at ECO's 'Energia que Move o País' conference on Thursday 28 May.

The 29 June reveal will fix three variables the storage market has been waiting on for months: the auction model — expected to be a pay-as-bid mechanism with a price ceiling — the grid-connection points where DGEG and REN can host the batteries without triggering reinforcement spend, and the calendar of bid submission, qualification and award. Industry submissions to the public consultation will run through summer, with the formal auction expected in the fourth quarter of 2026.

A revenue-sharing mechanism for host municipalities will function as a scoring criterion in the auction. Câmaras that accept battery installations within their boundaries will collect a slice of the partilha da receita obtida no âmbito da atividade dos centros eletroprodutores — a payment indexed to the electricity dispatched from the facility. Lisbon has been blunt about the political reason: local opposition to renewable projects has accumulated as solar farms multiply across the Alentejo and Minho, and ministers want a financial argument that mayors can present to município residents.

In parallel, the ministry is preparing contracts for difference for medium- and long-term price stabilisation. The CfD mechanism underwrites a strike price on dispatched electricity, paying the producer when wholesale prices sit below the strike and clawing back when they rise above it. The minister flagged CfDs as particularly relevant for higher-risk technologies — wind power, where Portugal's repowering pipeline at Trás-os-Montes and the Alentejo Litoral has stalled on revenue uncertainty.

The Estratégia also opens a window for repotenciação of existing wind parks, replacing 1990s and 2000s-era turbines with modern higher-capacity machines. ERSE has been working with the ministry on a fast-track licensing route that would allow capacity uplifts of 30-50% on the same physical footprint without re-triggering the full environmental assessment, provided noise, shadow and biodiversity baselines are maintained or improved.

The 750 MW headline figure sits inside a strategy pairing electrochemical batteries with hydroelectric pumped storage — a category Lisbon recognises as a strategic national asset. Pumped-hydro extensions at Iberdrola's Tâmega complex and EDP's Foz Tua and Alqueva sites have already absorbed the bulk of capital expenditure on long-duration storage; the new auction targets the four-to-six-hour intraday flexibility that Portugal's solar-heavy grid needs to clip evening price spikes when PV output drops and demand peaks.

For the broader system, 750 MW of battery capacity is enough to absorb roughly one hour of national peak demand or smooth around 3 GWh per day across the dispatch cycle — modest by Spanish or German benchmarks but the first scaled commitment Portugal has put on the table. The 28 April 2025 Iberian blackout, which ERSE classed an evento excecional earlier this month, still anchors the political logic for adding inertia and ride-through capacity to the grid.