Nio announced Friday that its energy arm and China Huaneng Group’s Marketing Department signed a Virtual Power Plant Collaboration Work Plan in Xiong’an New Area, turning a provincial pilot into a group-level framework for grid services across China.
The agreement covers virtual power plants, electricity trading and green-power consumption.
Nio said the plan will provide standardized guidance for Huaneng’s regional energy-sales companies to work with Nio nationwide.
Guandian.cn first reported the deal.
Nio put its network at 9,372 charging and swap sites as of Thursday, comprising 4,090 swap stations and 5,282 charging stations with 30,431 charging piles. Cumulative swaps have passed 120 million in early August and total charging and swapping services 200 million.
Between 2022 and 2024, Huaneng’s Zhejiang subsidiary and Nio connected about 114 to 115 swap stations as “VPP Unit 1,” delivering secondary frequency regulation to the Zhejiang grid.
A Tsinghua University energy-internet case study documented second-level control at those stations and described frequency-regulation earnings by 2024, though neither company has published what that unit earns.
September’s document is structurally different.
Huaneng’s group Marketing Department signed the plan rather than a single provincial subsidiary, which is what makes it a template rather than a project.
Signing took place in Xiong’an, where Huaneng has its registered headquarters address, in the new area’s start-up zone.
What Each Side Brings
Huaneng is one of China’s Big Five state-owned power generators.
Its provincial energy-sales companies hold the generation assets, green-power supply, trading licences and VPP platforms that Nio lacks. Huaneng has built load-side VPPs that aggregate industrial and commercial demand, distributed solar and EV charging, then sell that flexibility into ancillary-service and demand-response markets.
Huaneng has built “load-type” VPPs that aggregate factories, commercial air-conditioning, distributed solar and EV chargers, then sell that flexibility into ancillary-service and demand-response markets.
Nio brings physical infrastructure.
Its 4,090 swap stations as of September 17 are up 414 on the 3,676 it ended 2025 with. More than 800 were built and are owned by state-owned capital partners, with CFO Stanley Qu telling analysts this month that more than 40 such partners across 25 provinces are funding essentially all of this year’s new stations.
A fourth-generation station holds 23 packs, and the fifth generation raises that. Nio has not published a per-station daily swap ceiling for the new design.
A swap station functions as a small battery warehouse.
Packs can charge harder when electricity is cheap or when wind and solar output would otherwise be curtailed, and slow or pause when the grid is tight. Whether Nio’s stations discharge back to the grid at scale is not addressed in the announcement.
Provided enough charged packs remain on the shelf for drivers, the spare charging capacity becomes a controllable asset — what Nio calls “distributed storage.”
Nio Energy’s control system — described in the Tsinghua case study as a “vehicle–charger–station–cloud–network” architecture — uses order prediction to forecast when cars will arrive for swaps, with edge and cloud controllers adjusting station charging power at the second level while holding customer wait times steady.
One question the announcement leaves open is whose batteries are being dispatched. Packs leased under Nio’s BaaS scheme belong to Wuhan Weineng Battery Asset, the operator part-owned by CATL, not to Nio Power unit.
Nio has not said how revenue from grid services on those packs is allocated.
Green-Power Consumption
Two elements in the agreement extend the scope beyond frequency regulation.
Electricity trading means the bundled stations can participate in China’s power markets as demand-response resources, ancillary-service providers and, in provinces with more mature spot markets, retail electricity packages.
Huaneng’s sales companies already hold the trading licenses, customer books and settlement paths.
Nio has the flexible load but not the market access.
Green-electricity consumption refers to using Nio’s schedulable charging demand to absorb renewable generation that might otherwise be curtailed.
Swap stations can shift charging by minutes without drivers noticing, making them attractive sinks for off-peak wind and solar.
Attaching green-power certificates to station electricity could lower Nio’s energy costs, help corporate customers meet green-procurement mandates and give Huaneng a buyer for renewable output.
Policy Tailwind
China’s National Development and Reform Commission and the National Energy Administration issued guidelines on April 11, 2025, setting national VPP regulating capacity targets of more than 20 GW by 2027 and 50 GW by 2030.
VPPs were defined as digital platforms that aggregate distributed energy sources, flexible loads and storage systems, and the guidelines call for them to participate in medium- and long-term power markets, spot markets and ancillary-service markets as independent entities.
The two agencies went further in June, when their five-year plan for the new energy system added a target of roughly 50 GW of aggregated adjustable charging capacity from vehicle-to-grid interaction by 2030, putting EV charging and swapping infrastructure explicitly inside the national flexibility target.
Provincial and local governments must now draft plans to contribute to those targets.
For generation groups such as Huaneng and EV-energy companies such as Nio, a group-level framework simplifies compliance: Huaneng’s Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Shandong and other sales units can plug Nio stations into their VPP platforms using a single template rather than negotiating bespoke arrangements.
Broader Context
Huaneng is not Nio’s only energy partner. Nio has signed grid-services and battery-reuse arrangements elsewhere in the sector, and the Huaneng plan is about scaling within one generator’s national sales system rather than an exclusive arrangement.
Nio has also partnered with more than 40 local state-owned capital platforms to co-build stations across China.
The Huaneng deal is about scaling within one generator’s national sales system rather than an exclusive arrangement.
Nio added 679 stations in 2024 and 681 in 2025, slowing its own direct construction over the past two years to control capital spending.
The EV maker set a 2026 target of more than 1,000 new stations, bringing the year-end total above 4,600.
Fifth-generation stations began full-scale deployment in late July, with Nio targeting more than 100 new openings per month from September.
The work plan disclosed no megawatt target, investment figure or exclusivity clause. Execution still happens province by province, because electricity market rules and grid-access procedures differ across regions.
Customer swap availability takes priority; stations offer only leftover flexibility after ensuring enough charged packs remain for drivers.
No revenue-sharing terms were made public.
Guandian.cn noted that its report was compiled from publicly available information.
