The European Parliament adopted by 306 votes to 276,
with 14 abstentions, to raise no objections to draft
Commission Regulation (EU) No.../... amending Regulation (EU) No
1031/2010 in particular to determine the volumes of greenhouse gas
emission allowances to be auctioned in 2013-2020.
To recall, Commission Regulation (EU) No 1031/2010
provides the volumes of allowances to be auctioned each year, after
deducting the allocation given free of charge from the Union-wide
quantity of allowances issued in the same year.
A deviation from this time profile has also been
decided in Commission Regulation 1210/2011 to determine a volume of
allowances to be auctioned early, prior to 2013, with corresponding
reductions in the 2013 and 2014 auction volumes, with the foremost
objective to ensure a smooth transition from the second to the
third trading period, taking due account of the hedging needs for
compliance in the early years of the third trading period. These
annual volumes were decided based on the factors determining supply
of and demand for allowances at the time of the assessment and
assumption of an ongoing economic recovery.
At the start of the third trading period (2013-2020),
the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS) was characterised by a
surplus of around 2 billion allowances. The current imbalance in
the EU ETS is primarily due to the economic crisis and a large
inflow of international credits at the end of phase 2 in view of
restrictions on the use of certain credits introduced in phase
3.
The presence of a large surplus is a problem as it is
expected to lock the EU into high carbon capital and
investment.
As a short term measure to mitigate the effects of
this problem in the context of additional temporary imbalances
caused by regulatory changes linked to the transition to phase 3,
the Commission proposed to back-load the auctioning of 900 million
allowances in the beginning of phase 3 (2014, 2015 and
2016).