Baseload in South-East Europe did not disappear suddenly. It has been eroding quietly, unevenly, and often invisibly, masked by legacy assumptions about system stability. For years, coal and large hydro units continued to anchor prices, absorb volatility, and provide inertia even as renewable capacity expanded. That buffering role is now breaking down, and its loss […]
Wind power occupies a fundamentally different position in the South-East Europe electricity system than solar, and it is often misunderstood for that reason. While solar reshapes prices in a predictable intraday pattern, wind introduces discontinuity. Its defining characteristic is not abundance or cheap energy, but uncertainty. In a coupled regional system, that uncertainty does not
When one country builds solar, everyone pays: The spillover effect across SEE Read More »
Solar power has become the most misunderstood structural force in the South-East Europe electricity market. It is still discussed primarily as a national policy success — installed capacity, renewable targets, cheaper power, decarbonisation progress. In reality, once solar reaches meaningful scale inside a coupled regional grid, it stops behaving as a national asset altogether. It
The SEE power system: Interdependence, volatility and the end of isolation Read More »
The South-East Europe (SEE) electricity market has evolved from a loosely connected collection of national grids into a highly interdependent, volatility-driven system. Once considered a stable region with predictable energy flows and price patterns, SEE is now experiencing the growing pains of renewable energy integration, baseload erosion, and cross-border spillover effects. This transformation is not just
The industrial power playbook for SEE, 2026–2035 Read More »
The energy landscape in South-East Europe is undergoing an irreversible transformation. As the region moves towards a decarbonised, solar and wind-dominated grid, industrial buyers are faced with a set of risks and opportunities unlike any they have encountered before. Power procurement has become a strategic discipline, requiring companies to rethink their approach not just to cost
The rise of firmed PPAs: How SEE markets are repricing reliability Read More »
As volatility becomes structural across South-East Europe, a quiet but decisive shift is taking place in how power contracts are designed. The era of simple, energy-only PPAs is giving way to a more complex contractual landscape in which reliability itself is being priced. Firmed PPAs sit at the centre of this shift. They do not promise
The real hedge is flexibility: Lessons from SEE power desks Read More »
In volatile power systems, traders learn quickly what works and what does not. Strategies that look elegant on paper but fail under stress are abandoned. What remains are approaches that survive extreme conditions — tight systems, forecast errors, congestion, and sudden price spikes. Across South-East Europe, power desks have converged on a simple conclusion: flexibility outperforms
From price hedging to shape hedging: The next phase of SEE power risk management Read More »
For most industrial electricity buyers in South-East Europe, “hedging” still means one thing: fixing the price. This definition made sense in systems where price volatility was driven primarily by fuel costs, outages, or macro shocks, and where hourly price spreads were narrow. In such systems, locking in a forward price neutralised most meaningful risk. That
Buying green power in a volatile grid: What SEE industrial CFOs are missing Read More »
For most industrial CFOs in South-East Europe, electricity procurement has historically sat just outside the core financial narrative. Power was an operating input, negotiated by procurement teams, reviewed annually, and managed within tolerable variance bands. Sustainability added a new dimension, but it did not fundamentally alter the financial treatment of electricity. That separation no longer
Shape risk kills PPAs: The hidden cost for industrial buyers in solar-heavy markets Read More »
For most industrial electricity buyers in South-East Europe, price risk is still intuitively understood as a single number. When discussions turn to power procurement, the focus remains anchored on the average megawatt-hour price secured over a year. This mindset is increasingly disconnected from how power markets actually function. In solar-heavy systems, the dominant risk is
