The story of South-East Europe’s electricity markets in 2025 is essentially a story of a region learning to navigate a world where stability cannot be assumed and where every structural weakness eventually becomes visible in price behavior. Across the region, 2025 continued the pattern that began after the European energy shock: markets did not collapse, but they did not fully calm either. Prices were no longer at the crisis extremes of previous years, yet they also did not return to pre-crisis innocence. Instead, the region settled into a transitional phase where systemic uncertainty coexisted with gradual stabilization, a phase defined by fragile balance rather than confidence.
In practical terms, 2025 confirmed that volatility in South-East Europe is no longer an exception but a structural characteristic. Whenever hydrology weakened, the region immediately felt the stress. Whenever regional temperatures shifted, balancing costs reminded governments how dependent their systems still are on flexibility that is either insufficient or imported. Whenever coal units struggled, electricity imports rose and price pressure followed. Gas remained available, but no longer carried the illusion of permanence or cheapness; every state planning around it did so with the quiet understanding that gas is a stabilizer with political strings attached. At the same time, renewables multiplied, bringing welcome capacity but also exposing how unprepared many systems still are to integrate large intermittent volumes without robust balancing infrastructure and grid reinforcement.
This mix created a 2025 in which South-East Europe operated, but did not yet feel secure. Wholesale markets often traded in uneasy stability interrupted by stress spikes. Forward markets showed hesitation rather than conviction. Utilities continued managing risk rather than shaping opportunity. Countries that already possessed strong anchor assets, such as nuclear, hydropower depth or diversified import access, experienced visibly calmer market dynamics than those dependent on aging coal, uncertain hydro or limited interconnection leverage. The region therefore began to split more clearly between electricity environments shaped by capacity confidence and those shaped by capacity anxiety.
As 2026 approaches, the key projection is not dramatic transformation but deepening of this structural divide. Countries with nuclear power, advancing nuclear programs, expanding firm capacity or meaningful diversification are likely to experience progressively tighter price bands and greater long-term electricity credibility. The combination of stable baseload and growing renewables will begin to create environments where volatility is controlled rather than endured and where forward planning becomes genuinely possible. In those systems, balancing markets are likely to become more disciplined, emergency pricing rarer, and industrial buyers more comfortable making long-term commitments because they can reasonably trust that electricity will not become a permanent vulnerability.
For the rest of the region, 2026 risks looking like an intensified version of 2025 unless meaningful change accelerates. Hydrology will continue to dictate fate in years with poor rainfall. Coal fleets will not suddenly become younger or more reliable. Imports will remain expensive whenever wider European pressures reappear. Renewables will continue expanding, but without adequate system modernization they will remain double-edged: politically celebrated assets that still generate operational stress. Price volatility will linger, forward uncertainty will persist, and governments will remain trapped in short-term firefighting whenever seasonal stress collides with structural weaknesses.
The strategic meaning of 2026 for South-East Europe therefore lies in what the year represents rather than in whether it produces a spectacular event. It represents a moment where gradual divergence becomes clearer, where electricity systems anchored in credible long-term capacity begin to behave like stable markets and where weaker systems slide further into dependence on neighbors and imported solutions. It marks a continuation of a regional truth that is becoming impossible to ignore: price stability, market maturity and competitiveness are no longer determined mainly by market design or regulation, but by whether a country possesses firm, modern, resilient power capacity at the core of its system.
If 2025 was the year the region accepted this reality, then 2026 is shaping up to be the year it begins to live with the consequences of who acted early and who delayed.