MEXICO Trends and Developments Contributed by: Marco Tulio Venegas, LITREDI, S.C.
model’s coherence will be tested where planning, contract and public authority meet. The analysis that follows is doctrinal. It draws on con - stitutional provisions, secondary legislation, planning instruments, official policy documents and the general legal framework governing commercial arbitration. Because much of the model remains in implementa - tion, the discussion separates rules already in force from programme estimates, administrative announce - ments and project modalities whose practical opera - tion awaits later contracts and regulatory decisions. From market co-ordination to binding state planning The new framework places the planning and control of the National Electricity System within the State’s exclu - sive constitutional sphere and recasts CFE as a state public enterprise rather than a state productive enter - prise. Investment decisions, permits, interconnection and system expansion now answer to a planning hier - archy directed by the Ministry of Energy, with the Elec - tricity Sector Development Plan 2025–2039 supplying the long-term horizon and successive calls matching proposed capacity to identified regional, technological and network requirements. The institutional map was redrawn to match: regulatory functions once exercised by an autonomous body passed to the National Ener - gy Commission within the executive branch, and the independent system operator was reconstituted as a state public enterprise. Planning, regulation, dispatch and the principal generating enterprise are no longer distributed among institutions designed to check one another; whether that is read as coherence or as con - centration, they now answer to a common centre. What makes the plan binding is the set of decisions made to depend on it. Permits and interconnection are assessed against the capacity, technology and location that the planning instruments identify, so a project’s legal viability turns on its fit with the pro - gramme rather than on its ability to compete once built; the 54% floor operates in the same register, as a statutory instruction addressed to the planners rather than a market outcome observed after the fact. Even the calls through which private participants are invited originate in needs the State has already defined, so capital enters at a point where the essential ques -
tions – how much capacity, of what kind, and where – have been settled elsewhere. Economic regulation and the wholesale market survive, but within a public planning framework directed at reliability, continuity, affordability, energy security and the transition toward cleaner generation. The market has not been abol - ished; it has been subordinated to an instrument that now performs the co-ordinating work it once did. Mixed public-private ivestment in electricity generation If planning now supplies the system’s organising principle, the question becomes what space it leaves for private capital, and on what terms. The Plan for Strengthening and Expanding the National Electricity System 2025–2030 initially announced 51 CFE pro - jects, public investment estimated at more than USD22 billion and 22,674 MW of additional CFE generation capacity, alongside some 6,400 MW expected from private investment; later public information expanded the portfolio and separated capacity developed with CFE’s own resources, capacity under mixed schemes and wholly private capacity. These figures have shifted as planning and procurement have advanced, and are best read as programme estimates rather than fixed legal commitments. Materials published through the Energy Window in 2026 indicate that mixed develop - ment has since passed from a general policy modal - ity into project-selection and registration procedures, including calls addressed to specified generation needs and regions. Under that modality, CFE retains majority participa - tion (consistent with the 54% benchmark identified in policy and implementation materials), while private investors may contribute capital, technology, con - struction capacity or operational expertise. Mixed development is therefore narrower than the sector- wide coexistence of public and private generation: it is designed to distribute financing and project risk while preserving public direction. How it performs will depend on the transparency of project selection, the bankability of revenue arrangements, the objectivity of interconnection criteria, the adequacy of guarantees, and the allocation of construction, dispatch, curtail - ment, regulatory change and payment risks. Major - ity public participation may ease co-ordination with system planning; it may equally place project govern -
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