By Vera Eckert
ESSEN, Germany (Reuters) – European energy bourse EEX will publish a green hydrogen index, called HYDRIX, from Wednesday, scaling up price discovery in future markets for renewable energy, its chief executive Peter Reitz said on Tuesday.
“Hydrix will unveil information about actually traded prices for green hydrogen, produced with electricity from renewable energy sources,” Reitz said in an interview during the annual E-World trade fair, where the announcement was made.
“Clear price signals are the basis for the market ramp-up and further investments in the hydrogen economy.”
Germany and other EU countries are seeking to produce and import hydrogen as part of the bloc’s efforts to shift to a lower carbon economy.
Provided it comes from renewables – unlike “grey hydrogen” used by industrial processes from gas – hydrogen can become a storage medium to complement future green power production, which Germany wants to supply 80% of electricity by 2030.
EEX, a subsidiary of Deutsche Boerse, is continental Europe’s leading electricity and natural gas exchange.
It is tying big producers and consumers to its platformsand clearing functions in maturities that in power extend up to 10 years.
It also trades emission allowances, freight and agricultural products, among others.
The index will be publicly available on the EEX transparency platform each week, expressed in euros per megawatt hour (MWh).
Initial, “critical mass” contributors were recruited from a working group of more than 100 companies that helped develop the EEX hydrogen product design, and it hoped to draw on successively more.
“We have built-in security measures to prevent the index from being manipulated,” Reitz also said.
The MWh metric is comparable with other EEX products and intended to help build an intersection to EEX guarantee-of-origin products that certify the renewable qualities of power and hydrogen.
(Reporting by Vera Eckert, editing by John Stonestreet)
