Peru built a storage market before it decided what to pay for it

Peru's Law 32249 created a market for battery storage and grid balancing services, effective January 1, 2026. Nine months in, Osinergmin has still not published what a megawatt of frequency regulation from a battery is actually worth inside that market. The law arrived before the price did.

Most of the coverage of the reform treats the law itself as the milestone. We think the milestone that matters to a lender is the one still missing.

A market on paper, a price still being drafted

Law 32249, published in January 2026, rewrote the generation-sector law Peru had run on since 2006 and ordered a formal market for what the sector calls complementary services: frequency regulation, voltage support, black-start capacity, the balancing work a grid needs once wind and solar start displacing synchronous hydro and thermal on the margin. COES runs the annual competition analysis for each service. Osinergmin sets the maximum price a provider can be paid for it. That second mandate is the one that decides whether a battery pencils, and it has not landed yet.

Six months after the reform took effect, MINEM itself flagged the gap. In April, the ministry called for a further overhaul of complementary services rules, warning that the pace of wind and solar entering the SEIN risked blackouts without faster balancing capacity behind it, per Infobae's reporting on the ministry's statement. A regulator warning about its own reform, months after passing it, is not the language of a settled market.

Why mining got there first

The clearest signal of where the price risk actually sits is who is building storage right now. Mining companies, per Énergía Estratégica's reporting, are ahead of the utility-scale market, installing batteries for their own self-supply rather than waiting on COES to finish defining the capacity payment. A miner buying its own reliability does not need Osinergmin's tariff methodology to make the investment case. A merchant BESS project selling frequency regulation into the new market does.

That split is the whole tension, compressed. Self-supply storage monetizes against a contract the buyer already controls. Grid-services storage monetizes against a maximum price a regulator has not yet published, inside a market that exists in law but has cleared no transaction.

A law that creates a market and a regulator that has priced it are two different milestones, and a lender only gets to underwrite the second one.

What that does to the capex stack

Storage capex behaves differently depending on which revenue line sits behind it. Energy arbitrage, buying low and selling high against the spot price, is at least observable today; COES publishes dispatch and marginal-cost data a bank can back-test against. Complementary services revenue is not observable yet, because the tariff that would generate it does not exist. A project underwritten on both streams is underwriting one real number and one placeholder.

The placeholder is not worthless. Industry estimates cited by BNamericas put upward of $20 billion in private generation and storage investment at risk of delay specifically because tender, ancillary-service and isolated-system rules stayed incomplete for years before this reform began filling them in. The capital wants in. What it is waiting on is a number, not another law.

What we think follows

Osinergmin's methodology, when it lands, is more likely to price complementary services on an avoided-cost basis, what a marginal thermal unit would have charged for the same balancing role, than on what a battery actually costs to build and finance in Peru today. That is the same instinct that shaped Colombia's ENFICC framework for solar capacity: regulators tend to price a new technology against the incumbent it replaces, not against its own cost of capital. If Osinergmin follows that path, the first cohort of grid-services BESS gets financed on a discount to its real value, and the correction shows up at refinancing rather than at financial close.

Olmos Wind, the most advanced project in the ZFC Energy Group pipeline at approximately 135 MW in Lambayeque with battery storage integrated into the design, is being built into exactly this uncertainty. Ready-to-Build is targeted for the first quarter of 2028, two years after complementary services technically became a market, and on current form, likely before Osinergmin's pricing methodology has run through a full tariff cycle.

The open question

Whether Osinergmin publishes a maximum-price methodology within the next year that a lender can actually underwrite, or whether Peru's storage build-out keeps following the mining sector's path, self-supply first and merchant grid services years behind, is not something I know yet. The law says the market exists. The market says otherwise until somebody prices it.

See the full active portfolio or read more Insights.