Our partner Diogo Nebias was featured in an O Globo article on the 2026 Capacity Reserve Auction, which contracted 19.5 GW of capacity in two stages: the largest auction in the electricity sector since 2021.
The procurement involves R$ 64.5 billion in investments and covers natural gas, coal, diesel oil, fuel oil and biodiesel thermal plants, as well as hydroelectric plants. The contracts run from 3 to 15 years, with supply starting on a staggered basis between 2026 and 2031.
The capacity reserve auction does not contract energy in the traditional sense. It contracts availability, which is the assurance that plants will be ready to dispatch during peak periods or drops in intermittent generation. With the growing share of wind and solar sources in the energy mix, this type of procurement becomes structural rather than emergency-driven.
Between the contracted MW and the operating MW, the legal and financial execution layer is dense: formation and governance of SPEs, project finance structuring, issuance of incentivized debentures, capacity contracts with CCEE, insurance, guarantees, EPC and regulatory and environmental compliance. Each winning project requires simultaneous coordination among sector regulation, debt instruments and contractual engineering, and the level of sophistication of these instruments determines whether the project attracts competitive capital or gets stuck at the origination stage.
Infrastructure and power generation are strategic practice areas of PSNA. Our partners have experience advising domestic and international players on energy projects: from corporate and regulatory structuring to financing and closing, including project finance, incentivized debentures and capital markets transactions.
