SEE Archives - Page 14 of 21 - Balancing Energy

Oil & gas in SEE: Integration, exposure and Serbia’s central position in a region that can no longer pretend fossil risks are “national”

Electricity in South-East Europe has already become a shared risk ecosystem. Oil and gas are not far behind — they are simply at a more politically sensitive and strategically uncomfortable stage of recognition. For a long time, SEE countries managed hydrocarbons as largely national sovereignty domains: national gas strategies, national refinery issues, national storage, national […]

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Cross-border electricity integration made SEE stronger — but it has also hardwired shared vulnerability, with Serbia at the centre of transmission risk

For more than a decade, the strategic ambition guiding South-East Europe’s electricity evolution has been clear: integrate, harmonise, align with European rules, deepen liquidity, strengthen competition and build a regional market architecture that supports stability, investment and security of supply. On paper, this strategy has worked. Market coupling initiatives advanced. SEEPEX evolved. Transmission interconnectors improved.

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SEE renewables are expanding faster than stability — and Serbia now sits inside the volatility engine

South-East Europe is accelerating its renewable transition. Solar fields rise across Greece and Bulgaria, wind projects return to Romania’s agenda, battery pipelines begin appearing in policy documents, and Western Balkan governments increasingly wrap their industrial and geopolitical narratives in the language of decarbonisation. Looked at from a distance, the region appears to be moving decisively

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When gas balancing becomes a power-market problem

In a system where natural gas serves as the primary source of flexibility, balancing the gas network is no longer a background operational task. It has become a central determinant of electricity market stability. What once appeared as a technical issue confined to pipeline pressures and storage levels now directly shapes power prices, dispatch decisions,

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Spark spread in practice: A SEE focus

In theory, the spark spread is a straightforward concept. It represents the margin between the price of electricity and the cost of generating it from natural gas, adjusted for efficiency and carbon costs. In practice, particularly in South-East Europe, the spark spread has evolved into something far more complex. It is no longer just a

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Short-term disruptions, long-term consequences

Energy markets are often described as short-memory systems. Prices spike, conditions normalise, and attention moves on. This perception is increasingly misleading. In a tightly coupled energy system, short-term disruptions rarely fade without leaving structural traces. Even when prices retreat and flows stabilise, the system that emerges afterward is subtly but materially different from the one

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Volatility without borders

Volatility used to be treated as a market-specific phenomenon. Electricity was volatile because demand had to be balanced in real time. Gas was volatile seasonally, shaped by weather and storage cycles. Oil was volatile episodically, driven by geopolitics and global supply disruptions. These forms of volatility were analysed separately, hedged separately, and largely expected to

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When a shock in one market destabilises the entire chain

In an integrated energy system, shocks no longer respect sectoral boundaries. What begins as a local disruption, a technical failure, a weather anomaly, or a geopolitical event, increasingly propagates through electricity, gas, and oil markets with speed and intensity that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. The defining feature of today’s energy landscape is

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South-East Europe as Europe’s stress test: What the region reveals about the energy transition

South-East Europe does not sit on the periphery of Europe’s energy system. It sits at its edge in a different sense: the edge where constraints bind first, where volatility appears earliest, and where systemic assumptions are tested under real operating conditions rather than in models. The region is not an exception to Europe’s energy transition.

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One energy system, three fuels: Why Europe no longer has separate power, gas, and oil markets

For most of the modern history of European energy policy, electricity, natural gas, and oil were treated as adjacent but fundamentally separate domains. They were regulated through different frameworks, traded on different venues, analysed by different expert communities, and governed by distinct political narratives. Electricity was a question of grids, generators, and marginal pricing. Gas

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