IEX shares fall nearly 2% of Electricity Appellate Tribunal hearing of market coupling case

Shares of the Indian Energy Exchange Ltd. (IEX) are down nearly 2% on Thursday, October 30, as the Electricity Appellate Tribunal is set to hear the company's plea over the market coupling norms.

During the previous hearing on October 13, IEX was asked to file a revised plea by Appellate Tribunal, adding more parties as respondents.

New parties added in the plea are Grid Corporation of India, which was responsible for pilot studies and test run for market coupling and the competitors of IEX, Power Exchange of India and Hindustan Power Exchange.

The Tribunal had asked IEX to file revised plea in a week after October 13 and new parties were asked to file the response before today’s hearing.

Shares of IEX had declined 30% in July this year after the Central Electricity Regulatory Commission (CERC

) had approved the implementation of the market coupling norms, with the Day Ahead Market (DAM), in line with the Power Market Regulations, 2021.

The first phase of coupling in the DAM will be implemented by January 2026, under which, different power exchanges will act as market coupling operators (MCOs) on a round-robin basis.

A Market Coupler collects all buy and sell orders from all the power exchanges, which is then aggregated and matched to discover a uniform market clearing price, across all exchanges regardless of platform.

Shares of IEX are trading above the levels of July 24 that they had tanked to after the market coupling news. Brokerage firm Jefferies had maintained its "underperform" rating on the stock, expecting it to fall to ₹105. The stock though, reversed from those levels of around ₹130.

Shares of IEX are trading 1.5% lower ahead of the hearing at ₹146.36. The stock is still down 20% year-to-date.