UK set for first auction of carbon emission permits on Wednesday
• Sale seen as test of country’s separation from EU and bloc’s cap-and-trade programme as prices will have to be carefully balanced
The UK is set to start its own carbon market with the aim of putting a price on polluting that it hopes will help achieve the country’s ambitious climate goals.
The first auction of emission permits on May 19 is the latest test of how the country copes with the separation from the EU, its largest trading partner.
Until January, Britain was part of the EU’s emissions trading system, the world’s largest cap-and-trade programme and the centrepiece of the bloc’s efforts to limit climate change. By going it alone, the UK is forgoing a 16-year-old market that helped cut EU emissions by almost a quarter in the past two decades.
The UK auction will be keenly watched to see how close prices will be to those in Europe, where emission costs have doubled in the past six months. Too high a price could tilt the economic playing field against UK companies by overburdening them with permit costs, while one too low diminishes the incentive to invest in low-carbon technology.
While the UK market was designed to be almost exactly like the EU system, there are a few key differences. The main one is that it is much smaller. That means there are far fewer industrial and power-sector emissions that need permits. The UK is set to auction about 83-million permits this year, compared to more than 700-million for the EU.
It is an issue market participants are concerned about. Earlier this year representatives from industry groups in the UK and Europe wrote to Prime Minister Boris Johnson to urge him to link the carbon trading system with the larger EU system. That would mean permits from both the UK and EU could be used to account for emissions in either.
The smaller market size also raises the risk of bigger price swings. An emissions trading system is meant to give businesses an indication of when is a good time to invest in lowercarbon alternatives. A high degree of volatility could hurt confidence that the emissions price is a reliable figure.
“It’s an emissions trading system for a very small market, which makes no sense,” said Jan Ahrens, head of research at SparkChange, a platform to facilitate investments in carbon markets. “That has the risk of having high price volatility.”
Volatility and a surging price could also be affected by how much financial players buy into the market. Demand from investment funds helped drive the gains in the EU carbon price this year. Ahrens said the investors he works with are eager to buy British carbon.
So how much will emissions cost in the UK? The main indicator is the EU carbon price, which has gained more than 70% this year to a peak of €56.90/tonne on Friday.
The UK market is set to be oversupplied from the outset. The cap for total emissions is about 156-million tonnes, compared with about 97-million tonnes of actual emissions, estimated by BloombergNEF. That surplus is intentional, allowing market participants to accumulate
IT’S AN EMISSIONS TRADING SYSTEM FOR A VERY SMALL MARKET, WHICH MAKES NO SENSE
permits to hedge for future years. The cap is likely to be revised in the coming years to shrink with the UK’s plans to cut emissions this decade.
There is also a safety net built into the British system. Unlike the EU, the UK has a price floor so permits cannot be auctioned below £22. But similar to the EU, there is a mechanism for the government to add permits to the market if prices rise too far and too fast.
It is a part of the UK’s effort to ensure firms that need permits can get them and that prices do not bounce around too much.
“This is the first year, so they want to make sure the market is effective,” said Bo Qin, an analyst at BloombergNEF.
“Not too high, not too low.”