IEX’s electrifying run

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Editor's note: With stock indices breaking records every week and millions of new investors queuing up to trade on exchanges, you’d expect an equity bourse to be the most valuable listed exchange in the country today. That, however, isn’t the case. Instead it’s the Indian Energy Exchange, or IEX, which takes the podium.  The electricity trading platform, whose stock has witnessed a more than 4x increase in value in just the last year alone, is leagues ahead of the likes of stock exchange BSE and commodities trading platform Multi Commodity Exchange of India in terms of valuation. (A caveat: The National Stock Exchange of India, the country’s biggest stock exchange, isn’t listed.) IEX’s rise has been meteoric. Set up in 2008 to help utilities buy and sell power to meet contingencies like sudden spikes in demand, it wasn’t envisaged as a great business as nearly all power purchase agreements at that point were long-term contracts and just about 2.5% of power consumed was traded in the over-the-counter market.  Today, IEX handles 6.3% of an average 180 gigawatts of daily demand, which constitutes …