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Terna has opened the admission window for the second auction under MACSE, Italy's long-term procurement mechanism for electricity storage capacity. Applications run from 7 to 27 July 2026, the auction is set for 24 November 2026, and the round will contract 16 GWh of storage capacity for delivery in 2029. That volume is roughly 60 percent above the first round, which procured 10 GWh in October 2025 for 2028 delivery.
For battery developers and asset owners, MACSE matters for one reason. It offers a 15-year contracted revenue stream on top of merchant and ancillary earnings, which is the kind of long-dated cash flow that makes a storage project bankable rather than a bet on volatile spreads.
MACSE procures long-duration storage through a competitive auction and pays successful projects a fixed annual premium over a 15-year term. In exchange, Terna gains dispatchable capacity to manage a grid that is absorbing more wind and solar every year, and ARERA endorsed the phased build-up of that storage need in its March 2026 opinion.
The premium sits alongside the revenue a battery still earns in the day-ahead, intraday and balancing markets, so it is a floor rather than a cap. That structure is what separates a MACSE-backed asset from a pure merchant one: the contracted layer underwrites the debt, and the market layer keeps the upside.
The headline figures are set. Volume is 16 GWh, the contract term is 15 years, delivery is 2029, and the auction lands on 24 November 2026. The participation path is already ticking: admission applications close 27 July, qualification documentation is due by 10 September, and pre-auction guarantees and declarations by 20 October.
One number is still open. The reserve premium that caps bids and anchors the penalty structure has not been published for this round yet, so the clearing level remains the variable to watch. The first auction cleared as exceptionally competitive, and a 60 percent larger volume changes the supply-demand balance that will set where bids land this time.
A MACSE contract reshapes the whole revenue stack for an Italian battery. It lowers the cost of capital by putting a 15-year floor under the project, but it also constrains how the asset is dispatched and how the contracted and merchant layers interact. Whether the premium is worth bidding for, and at what level, depends on the spread outlook, the ancillary revenue a given site can capture, and how the penalty terms bite if availability slips.
Those are asset-specific questions that a single national figure cannot answer. The projects that win well in November will be the ones that priced the merchant baseline accurately before deciding what premium they needed from the auction.
Synertics models these storage revenue stacks across the markets we cover, pricing contracted mechanisms like MACSE against merchant and ancillary revenue for the individual asset rather than the system in aggregate. To weigh a MACSE bid against your project's merchant case, try the PPA Tool at https://synertics.io/signup/ or reach out at info@synertics.io.
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