Two reforms, three days apart, and only one of them touches storage
On 20 April 2022 the Diario Oficial de la Federación published a reform to articles 1, 5, 9 and 10 of the Ley Minera. It declared the exploration, exploitation and use of lithium a matter of public utility reserved exclusively to the State, eliminated lithium concessions for private parties, and assigned the mandate to a new decentralized public body, LitioMx. The bill was presented on 17 April, approved by the Cámara de Diputados on 18 April and by the Senado on 19 April.
Three days before that, on 17 April 2022, the constitutional electricity reform failed in the Cámara de Diputados with 275 votes in favor, short of the two-thirds majority a constitutional amendment requires. The two events are routinely spoken of as one. They are not. The lithium change is a statutory amendment to mining law, passed by simple majority, and it does not amend the Ley de la Industria Eléctrica or alter how any plant in Mexico buys or generates power.
For a plant director or CFO weighing battery storage at a Mexican facility, that distinction is the whole point. Lithium ownership is a mining and trade question. Whether a battery at your site earns a return is a Comisión Reguladora de Energía question, and as of mid-2022 CRE had not answered it. That gap, not the Ley Minera, is what determines the investment case.
What the mining reform does and does not reach
The reform reserves lithium to the State and removes the concession route. Holders of existing concessions face a review of their titles rather than an immediate expropriation, and the reform raises questions under the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement that will be argued for years. Mexico's principal lithium prospect sits in Sonora and is clay-hosted rather than brine, which makes extraction technically harder than the Andean salars it is often compared to. No Mexican lithium was in commercial production in mid-2022, and there is no public reserve statement from a Mexican state body that would let anyone size the resource with confidence.
What follows for an industrial buyer is short. A battery installed at a plant in Querétaro in 2023 will contain cells made from lithium mined in Australia or Chile and processed in China, exactly as it would have before 20 April 2022. Cell prices are set in global markets. The Ley Minera reform is a sovereignty and investment-treaty story. It is not a battery procurement story, and treating it as one leads to the wrong conclusion about timing.
The regulatory gap that actually decides the investment case
Storage in Mexico is a CRE permitting question and a CENACE dispatch question, and in 2022 neither body had a settled answer. CRE is the regulator that issues the disposiciones administrativas de carácter general governing how an asset connects, what permit class it holds and how it is settled. CENACE operates the Sistema Eléctrico Nacional, dispatches generation and runs the Mercado Eléctrico Mayorista. As of mid-2022 CRE had issued no general provisions defining an electricity storage system as a market participant.
A battery is neither a generator nor a load in the way the Ley de la Industria Eléctrica frames those categories. It is both, at different hours. Without a definition, a storage asset has no permit class of its own, no defined product to sell into the mercado de balance or into servicios conexos, and no settled treatment of the energy it draws from the grid when it charges. A developer cannot underwrite a revenue stream that has no rulebook, and a lender will not finance one.
We read this as leaving exactly one credible 2022 investment case for storage at an industrial site in Mexico, and it is a case that does not depend on CRE at all. Value that accrues entirely behind the meter is available today: reducing the monthly capacity charge under GDMTH, DIST or DIT by shaving the site's own demand peak, riding through the voltage events that damage motors and controls, and holding critical process load through an interruption. None of that requires selling anything to anyone. It requires only that the arithmetic on the site's own bill works.
The corollary is the part worth taking into a capital committee. Any storage business case presented today that relies on arbitrage between the Mercado del Día en Adelantado and the Mercado de Tiempo Real, or on payment for frequency response, is pricing a revenue line that has no legal basis in Mexico yet. Ask the vendor to show which CRE instrument creates it. If they cannot name one, strike the line and see whether the project still clears its hurdle rate on demand-charge savings alone. Many will. Those are the ones to build.
The policy risk that is already priced into your bill
Storage is not where an industrial buyer's regulatory exposure is concentrated in 2022. Legacy supply structures are. The decree reforming the Ley de la Industria Eléctrica, published in the DOF on 9 March 2021, changed the dispatch order to favor CFE's own generation ahead of private wind and solar, extended Certificados de Energías Limpias to clean generation regardless of commercial operation date, and directed CRE to review self-supply permits obtained through acts constituting fraud against the law. Its practical application was blocked for much of the following period by individual amparo suspensions.
On 7 April 2022 the Suprema Corte de Justicia de la Nación dismissed acción de inconstitucionalidad 64/2021. Several challenged provisions drew simple majorities against them, but none reached the eight votes required for a general declaration of unconstitutionality. The reform survived without the Court ruling on its merits with general effect, and lower courts remained free to decide amparos as they saw fit. The uncertainty did not resolve. It was simply extended.
Before that, in 2020, CRE revised the porteo estampilla transmission tariff applied to holders of legacy interconnection contracts, the autoabasto and cogeneración permits grandfathered from the pre-2014 regime. The higher charge was reported as applying from July 2020. La Jornada reported on 11 June 2020 that CFE Intermediación de Contratos Legados raised those porteo tariffs by 427 to 811% depending on voltage level. The exact CRE acuerdo number is not confirmed in public reporting we can verify, so we do not cite one. The commercial point stands regardless. A facility taking power through a legacy autoabasto structure has a live wheeling-cost exposure that dwarfs anything a battery decision turns on.
What the capacity numbers actually say
Renewable build-out in Mexico is real and it is the reason storage keeps coming up. SENER's PRODESEN 2022-2036 puts installed solar photovoltaic capacity in the Sistema Eléctrico Nacional at 5,955 MW and wind at 6,977 MW as at 31 December 2021, with geothermal at 976 MW (SENER, PRODESEN 2022-2036, Table 1, as reproduced by IMCO on 3 June 2022). Those are system-wide figures for the SEN, not utility-scale-only totals, and they should not be compared with utility-scale tallies from developer associations, which count differently.
Distributed generation has grown faster in percentage terms than either. CRE's semi-annual interconnection statistics recorded 1,551.09 MW across 211,098 interconnection contracts as at 30 June 2021 (CRE data, via pv magazine México, 26 June 2021), and CRE data reported at the end of 2021 put the total above 2,000 MW. The precise year-end figure is not retrievable from CRE's public statistics page, so we give the characterization rather than a false decimal.
For storage itself there is no equivalent series. CRE publishes no registry of grid-connected battery capacity in Mexico, and no public dataset supports a national storage figure for 2022. Any number circulating in vendor material should be treated as an estimate until CRE says otherwise.
Decide now, or wait for CRE
Three decisions separate cleanly. If the objective is demand-charge reduction, power quality or ride-through, the analysis can be run today from twelve months of CFE billing and interval data at the main meter, and the answer does not depend on any pending regulation. If the objective is market revenue from a battery, the honest advice in 2022 is to develop the site and the interconnection study but not to commit capital against a revenue line CRE has not created. If the facility holds a legacy autoabasto or cogeneración contract, the porteo review is more urgent than either.
What would change our view is a CRE resolución defining electricity storage systems and their participation in the MEM, together with a CENACE market rule creating a settled product for them. Until one exists, the forward-looking market case belongs in a separate discussion, which we take up in our note on where battery storage costs and technology are heading. This piece is about what the rules permit today.
Review whether storage clears on your own bill
Mexico Energy Partners can test whether a battery at your facility pays for itself on demand-charge savings and avoided downtime alone, without assuming any market revenue that Mexican regulation does not yet support. The review needs twelve months of CFE billing showing measured demand by period, interval data at the main meter, a single-line diagram and a description of the loads that cannot tolerate an interruption. Site-specific results vary with tariff class, region, load factor and consumption profile, and no range can be confirmed before that data is examined. See our battery storage analysis and our work on Mexican regulatory policy for background.