How to Read China's Power Market Information Disclosure: the 2024 Basic Rules (Public, Open and Specific Information; What Generators, Retailers, Independent Storage and Market Operators Must Publish; 2-Year Retention, 5-Year Sealing of Intervention Logs), NEA's 130-Item Table, and the 2025 Southern Regional, Zhejiang and Jiangxi Implementation Texts

Short answer. Since 31 January 2024 one national text governs what Chinese electricity market participants and operators must disclose: NEA's 电力市场信息披露基本规则 (国能发监管〔2024〕9号), valid for five years, covering the medium/long-term, spot and ancillary-service markets and six classes of disclosing party — generators, retailers, users, new-type entities such as independent storage, grid companies and market operators (trading and dispatch centres); it repealed the 2020 spot-market disclosure measures. The rules sort information into public (to everyone), open (to relevant market members) and specific (to specific members as operation requires); put the trading centre in charge of a disclosure platform with a unified data format and data interfaces; keep disclosed items available for at least two years; and run disclosure on year/quarter/month/week/day cycles, with forecast-type information before bidding opens and operating-type information the day after the operating day. NEA's own Q&A counts 52 articles and a 130-item attached table. A reader of a Chinese market therefore has three jobs: know which class a piece of information falls in (and so whether an outsider can see it), know which items each party owes, and know the regional text that fixes the deadlines — the Southern regional rules of June 2025, Zhejiang's notice effective 1 January 2026 and Jiangxi's 4.0 rules of September 2025 are the three read here. This guide quotes the national text by chapter and section because the .doc's article numbering is not carried in its extracted text; the Q&A's article count is the only article number used.

1. The three classes and who runs the platform

CNWattHub reading: the class label decides what a non-member can obtain. Public items reach the open web (company basics, retail packages, retailer annual reports); open items need a platform account as a market member; specific items are released to counterparties or to the party itself. A researcher who cannot find a bid or a contract is not looking in the wrong place — it is a specific item by design.

2. What each party owes

2.1 Generators

Public: identity, changes and shareholding links. Open: unit information (dispatch name, licence number, unit count, capacity and type, commissioning date, voltage level, maximum output, output-restriction technology such as fluidised-bed or high-back-pressure heating units, pumped-storage pumping capabilities and start-up times), co-located storage, output restrictions, and maintenance and retrofit plans. Specific: bids and contracts; unit performance parameters (minimum technical output, deep-regulation limit, ramp rate, marginal energy-consumption curve, minimum up and down times, start-stop curves, allowed daily start-stops, auxiliary power rate, CHP heat supply); actual output, on-grid energy and metering points; fuel supply, purchase price, stock and supply risk; monthly wholesale volume and average price; hydro and renewable output forecasts.

2.2 Retailers

Public: registered capital, asset proof (method, issuer, report number and date, total assets, paid-in capital), staff count with titles and social-insurance headcount, the annual report (basic situation, continued satisfaction of entry conditions, finances, operations, scope, performance, major events, credit, competitiveness) and retail package products. Open: performance-guarantee or insurance amounts and validity; for retailers with distribution rights, the supply licence, voltage levels, area and distribution price; audited accounts if any. Specific: bids; contracts with users and with generators; monthly wholesale settlement volume and average price; demand-response capability.

2.3 Independent storage

Public: rated capacity and corporate basics. Open: dispatch name and jurisdiction, commissioning date, voltage level, technology type (electrochemical, compressed air …) and location; market technical parameters — rated charge and discharge power and time, maximum adjustable capacity, maximum charge/discharge power and maximum sustained duration. Specific: bids and contracts; ancillary-service performance (sustained response time for peak regulation, frequency regulation and spinning reserve, maximum and minimum response, ramp rates); metering data including charge and discharge energy. Requirements for virtual power plants and load aggregators are deferred to later texts.

2.4 Market operators

The longest lists sit with the trading and dispatch centres. Public: rules and fees, business standards (registration and dispute procedures, load-forecast and ancillary-service demand methods, security-check specifications), credit information, market operation, exit lists, market structure (HHI, Top-m) and market suspension, interruption and restart. Open: periodic reports and violation notices, market interventions, third-party spot verification reports and, for fee-charging trading centres, audited overall revenue and expenditure; the trading calendar; grid diagrams; constraint information (equipment commissioning, outage and retirement plans, available section and inter-provincial capacity, must-run and must-stop units); clearing parameters (algorithm and running parameters, price limits, penalty factors, node and zone definitions); forecasts; ancillary-service demand; medium/long-term and green-power results; spot and ancillary clearing by period with congestion; operating information; settlement totals including imbalance funds; assessment and ancillary-service settlement details; retailer totals; and the raw log of market interventions (time, actor, operation, reason), excluding handling of graded power-safety accidents.

CNWattHub reading: for a trader the open list is a price-formation audit kit — price limits, penalty factors, node definitions, must-run lists, section capacities and the intervention log are exactly the inputs needed to reconstruct why a spot price cleared where it did. Whether a given province actually posts each item on time is the regional question (§4).

3. Adding items, confidentiality, sealing and sanctions

• Adjustment. Any member may apply to add or change items; the trading centre publishes the application, affected members have 7 working days to comment, and NEA or its regional office decides.
• Confidentiality. Parties sign a disclosure commitment letter before disclosing or consulting; staff may not publish statements that could affect market results without permission; members need confidentiality systems and training.
• Sealing. Any key information that helps reconstruct an operating day — clearing models, bids, boundary conditions, market interventions with time, actor, operation and reason, real-time data, settlement and metering data — must be sealed for five years save special cases, and intervention records are filed with NEA or its offices.
• Sanctions. NEA and its offices supervise; the trading centre reminds and reports; untimely, inaccurate or incomplete disclosure, fabricating or spreading false information and misleading information feed the trading credit evaluation and may bring dishonesty management, supervisory measures and administrative penalties under the Electricity Regulation Regulations; a timeliness/completeness/accuracy evaluation of each member is published to all members.

The surrounding national texts point the same way. The 2024 market operation basic rules (NDRC Order No. 20) state the principle 'safe, timely, true, accurate, complete, easy to use', oblige participants and grid companies to feed operators, have operators publish regularly to participants and the public, and assign the electricity regulator to write the disclosure rule; the 2024 supervision measures (Order No. 18) list disclosure among supervised matters, treat disclosure rules as part of the market operation rule set and allow failure to disclose to be handled as dishonesty with graded supervision. The 2023 spot rules make an established disclosure system a precondition for formal spot operation (with risk-prevention and credit systems and a public third-party verification report), require off-market dispatch and interventions in real time to be recorded and disclosed, and require disclosure of risk handling. The February 2026 State Council General Office opinion asks for inter- and intra-provincial trading to be fused in registration, declaration, clearing and disclosure, for retail-market disclosure and risk control, and for unified disclosure subjects and information-exchange standards.

4. The regional texts

CNWattHub reading: the national text sets the item list and the classes; the regional text sets the clock. Zhejiang's '5 working days after update' and 'by 30 April' are the kind of deadline a compliance calendar needs, and its monthly report and annual self-inspection are the documents a regulator will ask the trading centre for first. The notice body was read from a scanned PDF by optical character recognition; the table pages carry a text layer.

5. A reading sequence built from the sources

CNWattHub's reading of the sources as a checklist:

1. Classify the item. Public, open or specific? That decides who may see it and how to request it.
2. Find the owner. Generator, retailer, user, independent storage, grid company or market operator lists.
3. Check the clock. Cycle (year to day), forecast-before-bidding and operating-day-plus-one rules, 2-year retention; then the provincial deadlines.
4. Use the operator's open list for price audits. Price limits, penalty factors, node definitions, must-run lists, section capacities, intervention logs.
5. Ask for the intervention record. Sealed for five years and filed with NEA — it exists even when it is not public.
6. Read the regulator's evaluation. The timeliness/completeness/accuracy evaluation is published to all members; Zhejiang adds a monthly report and annual self-inspection.
7. Know the sanction ladder. Credit evaluation, dishonesty management, supervisory measures, administrative penalty; in Zhejiang up to interruption of participation in some or all products.
8. Check the spot precondition. A disclosure system is a condition for formal spot operation; interventions and risk handling must be disclosed.
9. Watch the 2026 agenda. Unified disclosure subjects and exchange standards and fused inter-/intra-provincial disclosure.

Scope limits

This guide reads the 2024 national rules from NEA's .doc attachment (cited by chapter and section, since the auto-numbered articles are not in the extracted text), NEA's Q&A, the 2024 operation and supervision rules, the 2023 spot rules, the 2026 State Council opinion, the Southern regional rules (attachment 4), the Zhejiang notice (body read by OCR from a scan) and Jiangxi's 4.0 rules. It quotes no disclosure evaluation result, no penalty case, no platform screenshot and no regional or provincial text other than the Southern region, Zhejiang and Jiangxi; the 130-item national table is cited only through the Q&A's count and the Zhejiang table rows.