Spain's New Capacity Market: Why Availability Is About to Become an Asset Manager's Revenue Line

That is changing. Order TED/966/2026 was published in Spain's Official State Gazette (BOE) on 17 September 2026. It creates a capacity market for the peninsular electricity system, which MITECO describes as an instrument that will make the system "more robust and resilient". For asset managers, the practical meaning is this: awarded firm capacity comes with a paid availability obligation, and providers will need to show they can meet it.

What the order sets up

The market pays for firm capacity in €/MW/year through technology-neutral, pay-as-bid auctions. Generation and storage providers may be required to make electricity available for injection. Demand-side providers may be required to reduce consumption. Both apply under the conditions the system operator and the applicable operating procedure set.

• Who can take part: generators, storage owners, final consumers, demand aggregators, and generation and storage aggregators. Generation must stay below 550 gCO₂/kWh and meet each auction's firmness and flexibility requirements. Providers cannot receive other capacity-mechanism payments on top. New investment is limited to renewables, storage and demand-side resources.
• How firm capacity is measured: installed capacity multiplied by a technology-specific firmness coefficient between 0 and 1.
• Three auction types:
  • A principal auction, generally held annually when adequacy analysis identifies a firmness need.
  • An annual adjustment auction for installations already in operation, with a 12-month service period.
  • A transitional auction, held annually with annual service periods until service from the principal auction begins. It is open to existing assets and new investment.
• Contract terms in the principal auction:
  • Existing generation and storage get a 12-month term.
  • New generation and storage get technology-specific terms capped at 15 years.
  • Demand-side resources can choose a term of 1 to 10 years.
• Verification: the system operator and the CNMC will verify and inspect service delivery. A secondary market will let qualifying installations transfer their rights and obligations.
• Funding: electricity suppliers and direct market consumers pay, through unit charges that vary by tariff segment and time period. Consumption in the highest-stress hours, capped at 10% of annual hours, carries more of the cost.

Spain is not alone. Italy, France, Belgium and Germany are among the European countries using or bringing in similar mechanisms, so portfolio owners with multi-country assets will recognise the model.

Several important details are still to come. These include the first auction date and the operating procedure that will govern qualification, obligations, testing, verification, settlement and compliance. Each auction call will also set its own inputs, such as firmness coefficients, volumes and technology reference terms. That uncertainty is a reason to prepare now, not to wait.

Why this matters for asset managers, not just developers

The obvious headline is that long-term contracts for new investment will speed up storage and hybrid projects. But operating portfolios are in scope too, through the transitional and adjustment auctions and the 12-month terms for existing assets. The points below are practical implications of the framework. They are not requirements already written into the order.

1. Availability becomes a commercial obligation

For awarded providers, availability becomes a regulated commercial obligation, not just an O&M performance measure. Today it mostly lives in O&M contracts and monthly reports. Once firm capacity has been sold, technical availability, deratings and operational readiness become commercial risks.

The exact consequences of non-delivery will depend on the compliance regime in the operating procedure. Even so, maintenance priorities are likely to change. The question will no longer be only "how many MWh does this fault cost?" It will also be "could this fault affect our ability to meet a capacity commitment?"

2. Be ready to prove it

The system operator and the CNMC will verify and inspect delivery, so asset managers should build an auditable record of operations. The precise data and testing requirements will come in the operating procedure. In practice, the record will usually need:

• Reliable, timestamped SCADA and dispatch data
• Documented outages and deratings, per asset and ideally per component
• A reconciliation between the capability you report and the capability you can demonstrate

Portfolios with patchy data, several OEMs and manual reporting will find this harder than those with one consistent source of truth.

3. Watch the gap between contracted and capacity availability

A likely contractual gap sits between private O&M availability guarantees and the availability standard an awarded capacity provider will face. Many O&M contracts define availability with exclusions or wide calculation windows. Asset managers should compare those definitions with what they plan to commit in an auction. Otherwise the owner may carry a risk the contractor does not share.

4. Portfolio strategy becomes a firmness question

Every technology will be converted into firm capacity using its own firmness coefficient. The final coefficients have not been published. They will largely decide how competitive standalone wind, solar, storage and hybrid setups are against each other, and they will be central to bidding strategy.

Asset managers will need to decide which sites to bid, how much capacity to commit, and where adding storage or repowering improves the case. That calls for a portfolio-wide view of real performance history, not nameplate figures.

How to prepare before the first auction

The auction details are still pending, but the groundwork is the same whatever they turn out to be:

The bottom line

The framework now exists, and the detailed operating rules and auction parameters will shape how much it is worth. The direction is already clear: Spain's capacity market pays for assets that are available when the system needs them.

The winners will not only be the companies that build new storage. They will also be the operators who know exactly how available their fleet is, catch problems before they turn into delivery failures, and can prove it to the system operator.

Delfos helps renewable asset managers across Europe monitor performance, detect anomalies early and build a reliable, auditable picture of availability across mixed-OEM portfolios. If you are assessing what the capacity market means for your fleet, talk to our team.

Source: Orden TED/966/2026, BOE, 17 September 2026; MITECO press release

‍