Since their launch in September 2024, Standardised Guarantees of Origin (GO) Futures on EEX have accumulated more than 30 TWh in traded volume. Monthly activity has continued to build momentum, setting a record of 6.7 TWh in September 2025, surpassing the previous peak of 5 TWh in July 2025. This sustained growth trajectory reflects the effects of reduced transaction fees and volatility in the market, as highlighted in our recent analysis.
EEX is set to further enhance its GO Futures offering on 8 December 2025. The planned expansion includes the introduction of Wind-Hydro-Solar (WHS) GO Futures along with Non-Supported GO Futures.
The WHS combined product is designed to mirror evolving bilateral market dynamics, where bundled WHS trading has increasingly become the dominant structure.
Alignment with OTC Market Evolution
In recent years, the bilateral GO market has undergone a clear structural transition. Initially, individual technology contracts began losing ground to broader groupings, with the “Any Renewables” category expanding rapidly from 2020 onward — largely at the expense of hydro-based products.
Since 2023, this trend has further evolved, with biomass-free WHS emerging as the dominant trading format. WHS have risen from 11 % of total OTC volumes in 2023 to 53 % in 2025, up from negligible levels in 2022 — a 43-percentage-point increase. Meanwhile, the “Any Renewables” category has sharply contracted, declining from 36 % in 2023 to 6 % in 2025.
Meanwhile, after contracting from 2020 to 2023, individual technology-specific contracts have remained relatively stable over the last two years, representing roughly 30 %, with wind at 7 % and solar at 2 % of total traded volumes.
This progression highlights a decisive market shift toward standardised, biomass-free bundled renewables, reflecting participants’ preference for more flexible yet clearly defined multi-technology certificates.
The shift in consumer preference toward biomass-free GO bundles seems to be linked with the beginning of a steep drop in GO prices, when it became clear that 2023 supply would be ample, leading the market into oversupply. The falling GO prices and the abundance of non-biomass renewable GOs increased the level of indifference for technology among consumers.
The introduction of WHS GO Futures provides a standardised hedging instrument for the most actively traded segment of the bilateral market. Given that WHS products now account for more than half of the OTC activity, these futures could attract some liquidity migration from bilateral to exchange-based trading.
However, this shift also carries the potential to cannibalise liquidity from EEX’s existing single-technology futures (hydro, wind, and solar) as traders consolidate activity into the more flexible WHS contracts. While this rebalancing could spread liquidity thinner across product lines, the overall effect is expected to enhance total traded volumes on EEX, though the exact magnitude remains uncertain.
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