Uniper starts electricity trading with Japan
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New Uniper team uses EEX products to enter Japanese power market
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Japan has large import needs and is looking for ways to decarbonize
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Niek den Hollander: "See great potential in the world's fourth-largest power market"
Uniper entered energy trading with Japan for the first time in March. A team of power traders and analysts from Uniper Global Commodities, specially assembled for the Japan business, used the new segment of the European Power Exchange (EEX) for several contracts with Japanese trading partners. Uniper sees great potential in the Japanese market. At around 1,020 terawatt hours/year, electricity consumption in Japan is about twice as large as in Germany, and the import demand for all energy commodities is enormous.
The country has been slow to open up to global energy trade. However, following a market reform in 2016, the volume of trading transactions has increased rapidly. Short-term electricity trading alone has increased twenty-fold since then, from 50 gigawatt hours (GWh) to more than 1,000 GWh daily. The strong demand for energy, the stable political and regulatory environment, and the liquid physical trading business make Japan an interesting market for Uniper.
Niek den Hollander, CCO Uniper: "Japan is to become a key building block of our broad-based Asia strategy. To achieve this, it is important to enter this emerging market at an early stage. Japan is catching up with a development in energy trading that began in Europe and the USA more than twenty years ago. As a first step, we want to sound out the potential and establish trading business and contacts. In addition to the size of the market, I see a particular opportunity in the fact that Japan, like Europe, is pursuing an ambitious decarbonization path. In the medium term, we hope to expand our business not only with electricity products but also with certificates of origin for renewable energies and structured trading products. In the long term, we expect stable earnings contributions from the new business opportunities in the world's fourth-largest electricity market. This will complement our existing cross-commodity presence in the region, of which Liquified Natural Gas - LNG - is an important pillar.”
About Uniper
Uniper is an international energy company with around 12,000 employees in more than 40 countries. The company plans to make its power generation CO2-neutral in Europe by 2035. With about 35 GW of installed generation capacity, Uniper is among the largest global power generators. Its main activities include power generation in Europe and Russia as well as global energy trading, including a diversified gas portfolio that makes Uniper one of Europe’s leading gas companies. In 2020, Uniper had a gas turnover of more than 220 bcm. Uniper is also a reliable partner for municipalities, public utilities, and industrial companies for developing and implementing innovative, CO2-reducing solutions on their way to decarbonizing their activities. As a pioneer in the field of hydrogen, Uniper is active worldwide along the entire value chain and is implementing projects to make hydrogen usable as a mainstay of energy supply.
The company is headquartered in Düsseldorf and currently the third-largest listed German utility. Together with its main shareholder Fortum, Uniper is also the third-largest producer of CO2-free energy in Europe.
This press release may contain forward-looking statements based on current assumptions and forecasts made by Uniper SE Management and other information currently available to Uniper. Various known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors could lead to material differences between the actual future results, financial situation, development or performance of the company and the estimates given here. Uniper SE does not intend, and does not assume any liability whatsoever, to update these forward-looking statements or to modify them to conform with future events or developments.
