Europe is rewriting its energy future. Electricity markets are being redesigned for precision, flexibility and integration. Gas politics have shifted from dependency illusion to hardened resilience. For many parts of the EU core, this transformation has already begun stabilising energy systems, restoring confidence and building the backbone of a decarbonising industrial continent. In South-East Europe, however, this transition has collided with unresolved legacy structures, political caution, incomplete integration and fragile institutional discipline. What emerges is a region caught between a Europe that is moving forward and old vulnerabilities that refuse to fully disappear. And the critical truth is that electricity and gas cannot be analysed separately anymore. They now define each other. They now shape each other. They now determine whether SEE participates in Europe’s new energy decade or remains its permanent weak flank.
Electricity reveals one part of the reality. Europe has shifted to 15-minute trading intervals because modern power systems require precision. Markets must respond quickly. Flexibility must be valued correctly. Integration must stabilise price risk. For Western Europe and the Nordics, this was evolution. For South-East Europe, it is exposure. Shorter trading windows magnify instability if interconnections are constrained, if trading cultures remain cautious, if TSOs hold capacity defensively, if regulatory certainty is episodic rather than structural. Europe’s electricity logic assumes trust between systems. SEE still often behaves as if sovereignty is safer than sharing. It is not. Isolation turns minor shocks into structural crises.
Gas reveals the other half of the story. The collapse of Russia’s dominance in European gas supply erased decades of complacent stability. Western Europe reacted with strategy. LNG import infrastructure was accelerated, storage regulation hardened, diversification enforced and solidarity mechanisms institutionalised. Gas became a security instrument again. South-East Europe did not have the luxury of carefully planned adaptation. It had to adjust within vulnerability. Some countries did it with speed and intelligence. Others hesitated. Today, SEE is no longer simply a dependent downstream consumer, but it is not yet securely rooted inside Europe’s fully diversified gas reality either. It sits in an uncertain middle space defined by infrastructure still under construction, political hesitation in some capitals and structural dependence that remains uncomfortable.
The combination of both trends defines the region’s true strategic position. Electricity without gas stability is fragile. Gas without electricity modernisation is economically obsolete. And the most dangerous scenario is when both systems reform slowly, leaving an entire region structurally exposed in an energy continent that is otherwise stabilising.
Country realities illustrate how closely electricity and gas now intertwine.
Serbia stands in the middle of this equation. It is simultaneously a critical electricity balancing system and a country still reshaping its gas security posture. On the electricity side, it carries hydropower strength but remains weather-sensitive. Its market opening exists but institutional trust and full liberalisation maturity are still developing. On the gas side, historical dependence remains a reality even as diversification opportunities expand through interconnections and regional cooperation. Serbia can either become the stabilising pivot that anchors Southeast European energy security, or it can remain the system that always sits one shock away from existential stress. The defining factor will not be technical capability. It will be whether disciplined governance and integration confidence finally become irreversible.
Montenegro presents a case where size does not define power. Its electricity sector performed beyond its scale, turning a small national system into a credible regional exporter. On gas, its role is not consumption-dominated, but strategically positional inside the Adriatic and Balkan integration narrative. Montenegro is writing a lesson for the region: discipline, openness and alignment with European frameworks can turn vulnerability into influence faster than political rhetoric ever could.
Greece has rapidly become one of the region’s strategic energy pivots. On electricity, it is racing ahead with renewables, facing curtailment, oversupply moments and balancing pressures because success has come faster than infrastructure. On gas, it transformed itself into a critical diversification hub through LNG expansion and interconnection relevance. Greece now embodies the region’s future direction: rapid transition, opportunity, stress, responsibility and emerging leadership. If Greece continues to mature both systems coherently, the southern flank of SEE becomes one of Europe’s strongest.
Romania remains the most structurally important strategic opportunity on the map. It combines nuclear reliability, electricity diversification potential, strong grid centrality and rare gas sovereignty capacity through production and Black Sea prospects. Romania could become the single greatest stabiliser of South-East European energy security — if administrative hesitation and policy inconsistency do not slow ambition into another lost decade of potential.
Bulgaria illustrates how electricity strength and gas vulnerability can coexist. With nuclear production and export relevance, Bulgaria could be a stable electricity actor. With past dependence and sudden forced diversification, it also represents how gas instability transmits political and market risk far beyond national borders. Bulgaria’s energy credibility hinges on whether future policy replaces volatility with trustable continuity.
Hungary represents structural import dependence in both gas and electricity exposure terms. It experiences high price vulnerability faster and more intensely than many neighbours. Its policies therefore walk an uneasy line between diversification necessity and political pragmatism. Hungary’s positioning shapes not only itself, but the behaviour of its neighbours, because markets reflect not just infrastructure but psychology. Markets price confidence or they price risk. Hungary influences both.
Bosnia and Herzegovina remains trapped inside governance complexity. It has electricity strength and gas vulnerability, but neither behaves as a strategic instrument because institutional division absorbs strategic capacity. Energy is not a forward-planning arena; it is a hostage to constitutional paralysis. That reality creates systemic exposure for the wider region because instability radiates.
North Macedonia remains structurally exposed in both systems. Electricity insecurity and gas dependence translate directly into household, industrial and political fragility. It is the country that most clearly demonstrates why regional integration and EU energy alignment are not political talking points, but survival mechanisms.
Overlay Europe’s strategic trajectory onto this landscape and the risk becomes visible. Europe is accelerating into a future where electricity is precise, flexible and fully integrated and where gas is diversified, LNG-enabled and geopolitically hedged. If SEE aligns, it becomes structurally safer than it has been in modern history. If it hesitates, it becomes marginal: a permanently vulnerable zone inside a stabilising continent.
And here lies the central issue: Europe will not slow its energy transition for South-East Europe. The continent will continue building 15-minute electricity markets, storage layers, digital balancing systems, interconnectors, LNG grids and diversified supply chains. If SEE remains behind, it will not simply be “catching up.” It will be living inside structural disadvantage. Electricity will remain volatile while Europe stabilises. Gas vulnerability will persist while Europe secures. That divergence will shape investment, industrial policy, financing confidence and political stability.
Yet SEE is not condemned to this outcome. In both electricity and gas, it has assets, partners, frameworks, financial pathways and strategic relevance. What it lacks — and what it must urgently acquire — is execution certainty, institutional courage and regional trust. Integration must stop being a reluctant obligation and become the region’s chosen identity. Sovereignty today is not measured by isolation. It is measured by how well a country survives shocks.
South-East Europe now stands before the same strategic fork on electricity and gas: integrate or remain fragile. Modernise or remain exceptional. Align with Europe’s next energy era or structurally fall behind it. It is no longer an academic debate. It is the foundation of whether SEE can truly be part of Europe’s next economic and geopolitical chapter, or whether it becomes the region Europe continuously has to stabilise instead of relying on.
Energy defines power. In South-East Europe, the coming decade will determine whether that power becomes security or vulnerability.