While hydropower determines how fat the margins are in wet years, coal and lignite still determine whether the lights stay on at scale in much of South-East Europe. Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania and North Macedonia all continue to rely on coal-fired thermal power plants (TPPs) for a substantial share of baseload. Behind […]
Hydropower is still the quiet balance-sheet engine of the South-East European power system. While wind and solar dominate headlines, it is the big river cascades, mountain reservoirs and ageing dams that decide whether utilities report record profits or scramble for imports at thin margins. Across Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania, North Macedonia, Croatia, Romania,
The narrative of EPS’s financial and operational stabilisation is inseparable from the utility’s evolving capital-expenditure (CAPEX) and financing strategy. After years of emergency borrowing, reactive repair spending and short-tenor loans, EPS is now managing a deliberate, long-horizon investment pipeline totalling several billion euros. These investments are structured not as ad-hoc line items but as a
Elektroprivreda Srbije (EPS) today stands as the central pillar of Serbia’s energy system, emblematic of the transition from crisis-mode operations to stable, strategic utility performance underpinning macroeconomic stability, export earnings and industrial competitiveness. After the volatility of the early 2020s — characterised by deteriorating hydrology, rising import requirements and high European wholesale prices — EPS
If operational stability defines the present of South-East Europe’s electricity utilities, investment and financing define their future. Across the region, utility balance sheets are repositioning around large capital-expenditure programmes covering renewable generation, grid digitalisation, environmental compliance, flexible backup capacity and storage. The dominant source of capital is not speculative private finance but long-tenor, policy-aligned financing
South-East Europe’s power utilities have moved from being passive state monopolies to becoming the most systemically influential corporates in their national economies. They are at once suppliers of baseload stability, hard-currency earners through cross-border electricity trade, primary vehicles for renewable-energy deployment, and quasi-sovereign financial institutions anchoring domestic banking and capital-market ecosystems. When looking across Serbia,
A critical layer beneath everything previously argued about Serbia’s potential role in mining fabrication lies in a question few address explicitly, yet every serious industrial strategist understands instinctively: who engineers the complexity, and where does that engineering capacity actually live? Engineering outsourcing, when examined deeply, becomes neither a threat nor a supplement to Serbia’s mining
Europe’s next industrial cycle is not a story of uncertain aspiration; it is a story of necessity. The continent has entered the execution phase of its Green Transition, infrastructure renewal, industrial electrification, defence-relevance strengthening, logistics modernisation and competitiveness rebuilding. That requires real factories, real equipment, real materials and real manufacturing ecosystems. It requires locations that
Europe’s industrial transformation between 2026 and 2030 will not be powered solely by large infrastructure projects, renewable assets, electrification systems or manufacturing upgrades. At the heart of this transformation lies something quieter but equally decisive — materials intelligence. The Green Transition is fundamentally a materials transition. It demands new generations of specialty glasses, performance coatings, engineered
Europe’s industrial competitiveness in the late 2020s will not be defined solely by policy frameworks, capital flows or digital transformation rhetoric; it will depend fundamentally on whether the continent can secure sufficient capacity to design, build, adapt and maintain the machinery that underpins its factories, infrastructure, transportation, energy systems and emerging technology ecosystems. Machinery manufacturing
