The electrical grid

There are two distinct electrical questions and they are routinely confused. The first is whether the country has enough power. The second is whether that power can reach the parcel you are evaluating. They are separate problems, and in the Bajío it is the second that bites.

What changed in the regulation

On 18 March 2025 the Diario Oficial de la Federación published the reforms consolidating the Energy Regulatory Commission and the National Hydrocarbons Commission into a single body: the Comisión Nacional de Energía, a deconcentrated organ of the Energy Ministry.

The CNE took over the granting, modification and revocation of generation and commercialisation permits, tariff regulation, and oversight of the wholesale electricity market. Permits issued by the CRE remain valid until they expire or are revoked.

The transition was not instantaneous. Deadlines and terms were suspended from 18 March until early June 2025 — roughly two and a half months in which filings went unprocessed — and the accumulated backlog was estimated in the hundreds of applications. For a project on a schedule, that kind of administrative interruption is as real as a physical constraint.

The physical constraint

The Federal Electricity Commission has an expansion programme for the National Transmission Network running 2025–2030, with dozens of line and substation projects. The Bajío appears explicitly among the priority regions, alongside metropolitan Monterrey and the northern border.

That the region is on the priority list is good news and, at the same time, confirmation of the problem: what gets reinforced is what is saturated.

The clearest evidence came from the tender itself. In the mixed generation process resolved in mid-2026, 7,411 MW were awarded, but 46 procedures were declared void. Of those, twelve were declared void explicitly for grid saturation and sixteen for lack of transmission capacity. In the Occidente region, against a target of 1,540 MW, only 310 were awarded.

The reading for an industrial occupier is direct. Generation is being built. The capacity to carry it to where it is consumed is advancing more slowly. A generation project that cannot be evacuated is stranded energy, and a plant that cannot interconnect is a stopped plant, however much surplus the country has on paper.

What to verify about a parcel

• Which substation feeds the park, and what capacity it has available today — not installed capacity, available capacity
• How much load is committed to occupiers already installed and to signed contracts not yet energised
• What interconnection studies the process's load level requires, and how long they are actually taking
• Whether reinforcement work is scheduled for that substation in the expansion programme, and in which year
• What headroom distributed generation offers under the current threshold, and at what real cost per kWh

The answer to the first question is not in the park's brochure. It is with the relevant distribution division, and it usually requires a formal request. That is exactly the kind of verification that separates a site study from a recommendation.