On 9 July, a draft amendment to the Regulation on auctioning of greenhouse gas emission allowances under the Emissions Trading Scheme was published on the Better Regulation portal, which launches a four-week period for the collection of feedback from stakeholders.
Since 2012, several billion allowances of the EU Emission Trading System (‘EU ETS’) have been auctioned in regular auctions in accordance with the ETS Directive 2003/87/EC and the ETS Auctioning Regulation (EU) No 1031/2010.
Following a revision of the ETS Directive concluded in 2018 the ETS Auctioning Regulation needs to be changed accordingly to take account of new rules and elements for phase 4 of the EU ETS (2021-2030) thus adopted. This concerns inter alia rules for enabling the European Investment Bank (EIB) to serve as auctioneer of allowances for the Innovation and Modernisation Fund on the common auction platform.
An amendment to the ETS Auctioning Regulation is also necessary since emission allowances are classified as financial instruments under European financial regulation from the beginning of 2018.
In addition, the experience from the first six years of auctioning in phase 3 of the EU ETS (2013-2020) has shown that certain aspects of the auction rules should be simplified or improved.
While a number of changes are foreseen, the overall architecture of the auction process remains unchanged.
The Commission intends to adopt the draft delegated act after the four-week stakeholder feedback period and then submit it to the European Parliament and Council. Following standard procedures, the Regulation will then be published and will enter into force within two months, provided no objections are raised.