From the editor
The quiet ascent of European allowances
For a market that began the year on the brink of structural surplus, the EU Emissions Trading System has staged the kind of recovery that ought to give policy-watchers pause. EUA settled at € 87.40 on Friday — up nearly seven percent on the month, and within striking distance of the eighty-eight handle that traders have been circling since February's low of sixty-one.
The rally is, on its surface, a familiar story: cold-snap power demand, slower industrial allocation under Phase IV's tightening cap, and a wave of utility hedging into the summer compliance window. Beneath that, however, sit two structural shifts our analyst desk has been quietly tracking since the autumn.