Brazil’s December auction for battery storage capacity is really two auctions, one requiring proof of national content and one that does not. CATL, the world’s largest battery maker, is pursuing the harder path through a partnership with Moura, a Brazilian company whose role in their existing relationship has so far been assembly and after-sales service rather than cell manufacturing, a distinction that matters for what Brazil’s localization requirement will actually deliver.
The Brazilian Ministry of Mines and Energy’s Ordinance No. 136/2026 splits December’s Capacity Reserve Auction for battery storage into two separate processes. Auction No. 5, scheduled for December 2, requires bidders to demonstrate national content through accreditation under the National Bank for Economic and Social Development’s CFI System. Auction No. 6, held two days later, carries no such requirement and is open to any qualifying battery energy storage system. Both award 15-year Power Capacity Reserve Contracts with supply beginning August 1, 2028. CATL’s decision to pursue the more demanding of the two, in partnership with Moura and an unnamed power conversion systems partner described as a Brazilian market leader, is the more analytically interesting choice precisely because an easier, unrestricted path to the same contract structure exists two days later on the calendar.
CATL and Moura are not building this relationship from nothing. The two companies signed a formal strategic partnership for South America’s lithium battery market in September 2023, under which Moura became responsible for after-sales service and maintenance of CATL lithium batteries across the region, training its technicians and certifying them on CATL’s cell technology. That arrangement built on an even earlier collaboration, disclosed in 2021, in which Moura assembled battery systems for Volkswagen’s electric trucks using cells shipped from CATL, integrating more than 30 components including the battery management system at its Belo Jardim, Pernambuco facility before the completed system moved to Volkswagen’s assembly line. Moura itself is a 65-year-old, family-founded manufacturer whose core business remains lead-acid automotive batteries, a company that only began developing lithium battery capability around 2019 and has since built its lithium business substantially around integrating and servicing cells supplied by outside partners rather than manufacturing cells domestically. That history matters for assessing what Brazil’s national content requirement, tied to BNDES accreditation, will actually certify in the storage auction: a genuine expansion of Brazilian cell manufacturing capability, or a formalization of an assembly and service role Moura has already been performing for CATL products for several years.
The scale CATL brings to that partnership is not in question. The company reported CNY 53.26 billion in energy storage revenue for the first half of 2026, up 87.54% year over year, and cited SNE Research data crediting it with 125 GWh of energy storage battery shipments in the same period and the largest global market share. Independent assessments lend some support to that positioning: S&P Global Energy named CATL a Tier 1 supplier of storage cells and systems for 2026 and ranked it first globally by market share in both categories, Wood Mackenzie placed it among the top three global BESS integrators with an “A” rating, and BloombergNEF has kept CATL on its Tier 1 storage list for eleven consecutive quarters. CATL’s specific claim of a 45% share of the Brazilian storage market is company-reported and not independently verified in available third-party data, though the broader trajectory of its overseas expansion, projects cited in Bulgaria, Australia and the United States alongside Brazil, is consistent with a company whose growth increasingly depends on markets outside China. That dependency has a domestic root: China’s own battery production has been running roughly three times faster than domestic installation growth through much of 2026, a gap that energy storage exports and international grid projects have been absorbing, making aggressive expansion into markets like Brazil’s new storage auction less a matter of choice than a structural requirement for a manufacturing base that continues to outpace the demand growth of its home market.
The competitive environment CATL and Moura are entering is likely to be considerably tighter than the announcement’s framing suggests. Brazil’s broader capacity reserve auction system has consistently drawn far more registered project capacity than gets contracted, the March 2026 non-storage LRCAP auction contracted approximately 19 gigawatts of firm capacity against more than 125 gigawatts of projects that had registered to participate, and reporting ahead of the storage-specific auctions put the battery project pipeline already in line at around 20 gigawatts. If the storage auctions follow a similar contraction ratio between registered interest and awarded capacity, satisfying the national content requirement will be a precondition for participating in Auction No. 5, not a guarantee of winning contracted volume, and CATL’s parallel option to bid into Auction No. 6 without the localization requirement suggests the company is hedging its exposure across both processes rather than betting exclusively on the local content route.
The products CATL showcased in São Paulo, the TENER S with liquid cooling designed to hold capacity flat for five years of a 20 year design life, the 575 amp-hour TENER H offering 9 MWh per container with configurable two, four or eight hour durations, and the newly introduced TENER Sodium with IEC, UL and CE certification and a 30 MWh integrated design, represent genuine technical differentiation in a market where duration flexibility and degradation performance are becoming key procurement criteria alongside price. None of that technical capability, however, changes where the underlying cell manufacturing and battery management system engineering actually sits. Brazil’s national content rules are structured to encourage exactly the kind of local industrial participation Moura’s role represents, assembly, integration, service infrastructure and after-sales support delivered by a Brazilian company. Whether that satisfies the underlying policy goal of building independent domestic battery manufacturing capacity, as opposed to formalizing a well-established channel for distributing and servicing equipment engineered and largely manufactured by the world’s dominant battery producer, is a distinction Brazil’s auction framework will have to confront again as it evaluates bids against the accreditation standard it has set.
