Thermal power in South-East Europe in 2026 will not be determined by a single “coal versus renewables” narrative. It will be determined by how much hydropower the region actually receives, how high the CO₂ price floor sits across European-linked markets, how reliably coal mining can deliver lignite tonnage to power plants, and how much cross-border […]
Hydropower will be the decisive swing factor for South-East Europe in 2026 because it is simultaneously energy, seasonal storage, and the region’s cheapest source of flexibility. The market has increasingly learned that the same installed hydro fleet can produce two radically different economic outcomes depending on inflows: in a wet year, hydro compresses day-ahead prices,
South-East Europe’s gas market has stopped behaving like a collection of national utilities buying pipeline molecules and passing them through regulated tariffs. It is turning into a corridor-and-liquidity system where the marginal price is increasingly set by LNG access, storage withdrawal rates, and cross-border interconnector capacity rather than by any single long-term contract. The region
South-East Europe’s refining system and Serbia’s turning point under a MOL takeover Read More »
South-East European refining is not defined by refinery nameplates alone. It is defined by who controls crude access, who can finance inventories through cycles, and who owns the corridors that physically move oil. In this system, refineries behave less like isolated industrial plants and more like nodes inside a politically and financially constrained logistics network.
Europe’s electricity transition has reached a phase where policy ambition and capital availability are no longer the binding constraints. The limiting factor is execution. Transmission and distribution operators across the continent have secured investment envelopes that now push annual grid-related capital expenditure toward €110–130 billion by the late 2020s. Yet project timelines are slipping, EPC risk premiums
Europe’s electricity landscape entered a new era in late 2025 when the European Commission unveiled a comprehensive Grids Package designed to modernise, expand and future-proof the continent’s electricity network. This initiative aims to address persistent infrastructure bottlenecks that have limited cross-border flows, constrained renewable energy growth, and contributed to stark price disparities across markets. What
How U.S. energy strategy is reshaping Southeast Europe’s gas market Read More »
Southeast Europe’s gas market entered 2025 in a structurally different position from where it stood only a few years earlier. The transformation has been driven less by short-term price movements and more by a deliberate geopolitical and infrastructure strategy in which the United States has assumed a central role. The November 2025 analysis by the
Investment flows into the Southeast Europe energy sector in 2025 represent one of the clearest signals that the region has moved from being perceived as a peripheral, high-risk energy market to a structurally relevant investment destination within the broader European energy transition. While total capital volumes remain below those deployed in core EU markets such as Germany,
SEE energy market 2025: Strategic shifts in gas security and market dynamics Read More »
The energy landscape in Southeast Europe in 2025 is defined by several converging pressures: enduring structural dependence on imported natural gas, ongoing price segmentation, evolving infrastructure tied to LNG and interconnectors, and the region’s shifting role at the nexus of European energy security policy. These dynamics are shaped by both market forces and geopolitical shifts, reflecting broader
The evolution of the natural gas market in Southeast Europe has become one of the most consequential structural themes in the region’s broader energy transition and industrial competitiveness debate. Unlike electricity, where SEE countries possess significant domestic generation capacity through hydro, coal, nuclear in Bulgaria, and increasingly renewables, gas has historically been the system’s weakest
