The Austrian Government intends to hold its third EU allowance auction on 23 March for 300,000 EUAs, within the EU Emissions Trading Scheme, on the Climex Platform.
For compliance companies under the EU ETS it is opportunity to become acquainted with an allocation auction held in the same format as the auctions organised in phase III of the EU ETS are likely going to be: single round, closed order book and a single clearing price.
The auction will be exactly the same as the previous two auctions; the competitive auction with 200,000 EUAs for sale and the non-competitive auction with 100,000 EUAs.
The auction will be exactly similar to the format used so far by auctioning governments and has received the EU consensus as the design for post 2013 allocation auctions.
The non-competitive auction was specially developed for SME not active on the trading market and offers them small number purchases of EUAs for their compliances. The minimum bid size is 50 EUAs. Participants in the non-competitive auction only bid for volumes and the price will be defined during the competitive auction.
During phase II of the EU-ETS (2008-2012), the Austrian Government is allocating an annual average of 30.33 million emission allowances to Austrian installations participating in the EU ETS. According to the Austrian Allocation Plan and corresponding ordinance, two million EUAs (about 500,000 per year, starting 2009) – accounting for 1.3 per cent of the total number – will be auctioned throughout this period at two auctions per year.
The first Austrian Auction, consisting of a non-competitive and a competitive auction format, was coordinated and conducted by Climex with the support of ÖEKV on 16 March 2009 on behalf of the Austrian Federal Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, Environment and Water Management. A total of 205,050 EUAs were sold at EUR11.65, with 5,050 EUAs resulting from the non-competitive auction, leaving the remaining 94,950 EUAs from the non-competitive auction for later auctions.
The second Austrian auction was a competitive auction, which took place on 13 October 2009. A total of 200,000 EUAs was sold at EUR14.23.
