Mozambique rewrites its concession rules, and generators read a new text.

An independent power producer planning a project in Mozambique now applies for its concession under a text published this year, not one written a generation ago. The electricity regulator, ARENE, has published Decree 31/2026 of 7 July, which sets out who decides what, and by what steps, when a concession to generate, store, transport, distribute or trade electricity is granted, carried out or brought to an end. Trading, importing and exporting sit in the same text, so a project selling to a power utility at home and one selling across a border read the same rules.

The instrument is titled "Regulamento para a Atribuição, Execução e Extinção de Concessões", and the regulator's notice of it carries the date 7 August 2026. The decree itself is published for download beside that notice.

Two older instruments fall away. Decree 31/2026 revokes Decree 8/2000 of 20 April and Decree 42/2005 of 29 November, the texts that carried concession practice through the previous quarter century.

The regulation reaches past the award itself. It also covers the life of a concession: how the works are planned and financed, how they are built, owned, operated and maintained, and the terms on which they are returned at the end. On this reading, the obligations that fall due in a project's final years now sit in the same instrument as the rules for its first, which matters most to anyone pricing a concession with a fixed term and a handback at the close of it.

For a PPA holder whose agreement predates July, the question worth settling is which text governs an extension or an early exit, and which office signs that off. Read together, the new procedures and the two revocations give market reform here a single procedural spine: one document now holds how a Mozambican concession is won, run and ended.