Nio and Huaneng Sign Framework for Nationwide Grid Services

Nio announced Friday that its energy arm and the Marketing Department of China Huaneng Group signed a Virtual Power Plant Collaboration Work Plan in Xiong’an New Area. This agreement elevates a previous provincial pilot into a group-level framework, providing standardized guidance for Huaneng’s regional energy-sales companies to collaborate with Nio nationwide. The deal covers virtual power plants, electricity trading, and green-power consumption, marking a structural shift from localized projects to a replicable model for grid services.

As of Thursday, Nio operates a network of 9,372 charging and swap sites, comprising 4,090 swap stations and 5,282 charging stations equipped with 30,431 charging piles. Cumulative swap operations have surpassed 120 million in early August, while total charging and swapping services have reached 200 million. This infrastructure forms the physical basis for the new grid-service collaboration, leveraging Nio’s extensive footprint to offer flexibility to the power grid.

Huaneng Brings Generation Assets and Trading Licenses

Huaneng, one of China’s Big Five state-owned power generators, contributes generation assets, green-power supply capabilities, trading licenses, and VPP platforms that Nio does not possess. The utility has developed load-side virtual power plants that aggregate industrial and commercial demand, distributed solar, and EV charging. These aggregated resources are sold into ancillary-service and demand-response markets, providing Huaneng with a mechanism to monetize grid flexibility through established market channels.

The previous collaboration between 2022 and 2024 involved Huaneng’s Zhejiang subsidiary connecting approximately 114 to 115 Nio swap stations as “VPP Unit 1.” This unit delivered secondary frequency regulation to the Zhejiang grid. A Tsinghua University case study documented second-level control at these stations, noting frequency-regulation earnings by 2024, although neither company has disclosed the specific revenue figures generated by this initial pilot.

Nio Leverages Swap Stations as Distributed Storage

Nio’s 4,090 swap stations as of September 17 represent a 414-station increase over the 3,676 stations at the end of 2025. More than 800 of these stations are built and owned by state-owned capital partners, with CFO Stanley Qu noting that over 40 partners across 25 provinces are funding most of this year’s new additions. Each station functions as a small battery warehouse, allowing packs to charge when electricity is cheap or renewable output is high, and to slow or pause charging when grid demand peaks.

Nio Energy’s control system utilizes a “vehicle–charger–station–cloud–network” architecture to manage this flexibility. The system employs order prediction to forecast vehicle arrivals for swaps, with edge and cloud controllers adjusting station charging power at the second level. This approach maintains customer wait times while optimizing energy consumption. However, the announcement does not clarify whether Nio’s stations will discharge power back to the grid at scale, leaving the extent of bidirectional energy flow undefined.

Revenue Allocation Remains Unresolved for Leased Packs

The agreement extends scope beyond frequency regulation to include electricity trading, allowing bundled stations to participate in power markets as demand-response resources and ancillary-service providers. A key ambiguity remains regarding ownership of the batteries being dispatched. Packs leased under Nio’s Battery as a Service scheme belong to Wuhan Weineng Battery Asset, an operator part-owned by CATL, rather than Nio’s Power unit.

Nio has not specified how revenue from grid services generated by these leased packs will be allocated between the asset owner and the service provider. This structural detail is critical for understanding the economic viability of the collaboration for both parties. The framework signed in Xiong’an, where Huaneng maintains its registered headquarters, establishes the procedural template for these interactions, but the financial mechanics of asset-level grid services remain open questions for stakeholders.