The Hindu Business Line : Financial Tech gets nod for setting up power exchange

Mumbai, Sept. 20 Financial Technologies (India) Ltd has received approval from the Central Electricity Regulatory Commission (CERC) to set up a national level power exchange.

The exchange would be called Indian Energy Exchange Ltd (IEX) for trading in electricity.

Financial Technologies and a joint consortium will promote IEX.

PTC India Ltd will pick up 26 per cent stake in it.

Tata Power Company, Reliance Energy, Rural Electrification Corporation, Adani Enterprises and IDFC are the other consortium members who will take stake in the exchange, a release said.

The exchange would attempt to bring about an efficient price discovery in the electricity market.

Mr Dewang Neralla, co-founder of Financial Technologies, said: “A pan-India neutral and transparent energy exchange is the need of the hour for strengthening of the power sector by providing them efficient short term and long term price signals.”

He added: “IEX’s endeavour will be to create a platform that can eradicate the gap between buyers and sellers by taking the supply where the demand exists at most efficient equilibrium price.”

In India, the scope for trading power is huge even with the current power shortage scenario. There is an imbalance of resources in the country.

On one hand, there is the eastern region, which is rich in coal sources and where a number of pithead power plants have been set up.

The North-Eastern region holds a lot of hydel potential, whereas on the other hand, the western and northern regions of the country have huge demand and suffer from a heavy deficit due to large industrial and agricultural load, the release said.

IEX will be the change agent for distributing power for bridging the gap between demand and supply by uniting all buyers and sellers on a single platform to trade at a common national price.