An overview of energy developments across the region. For full analytical coverage — including project-level detail, regulatory tracking, and investment intelligence — subscribe to our Daily Briefings and Monthly Strategic Digest.
A heatwave reshaped the region’s energy picture this week, pushing demand to seasonal highs and widening the price gap between markets able to export surplus solar and those still leaning on thermal generation and imports. Beneath that ran a standard story: uneven progress toward EU energy market integration, complicated by unresolved questions over Russian-linked assets, stalled cross-border infrastructure, and mounting fiscal strain at state utilities. This week exposed, more than most, how far grid and storage capacity still lag the region’s renewable ambitions.
Energy Policy and Regulatory Direction
Serbia’s energy utilities remain under fiscal scrutiny, with the International Monetary Fund pressing the government to address large debts at both the state-owned electricity and gas companies and to proceed with tariff adjustments that have repeatedly been delayed on social grounds. The cost-reflective pricing, leaner utility payrolls, and firmer debt collection are politically uncomfortable in an election year, and Belgrade continues to balance that conditionality against ongoing subsidies for vulnerable households. A similar dynamic, smaller in scale, is evident in Republika Srpska, where the entity’s power utility has taken a series of loans this year to cover import costs rather than raise prices, a reminder that subsidized tariffs across the region increasingly manifest as financial risk rather than disappearing.
The unresolved ownership status of Serbia’s national oil company continued to dominate, with Washington extending sanctions-related operating licenses in short increments (this time until 31 July). Each extension postpones rather than resolves the question of whether Serbia’s fuel supply chain will need to be restructured on short notice.
A parallel debate over energy alignment is playing out in Kosovo, where American diplomats continue to press for participation in regional LNG initiatives while a stalled Assembly and a caretaker government have delayed passage of a new energy law, a delay that now begins to cost Pristina both EU funding and investor confidence.
On the regulatory front, alignment with EU electricity and renewables rules continued to advance unevenly. North Macedonia adopted a new renewables law, bringing, among other things, contracts-for-difference and a guarantee-of-origin system into force, a substantive step toward tradable green power.
Energy Community ministers meeting in Pristina this week reported that the region is nearing full transposition of the EU’s electricity market integration package, a milestone that would bring Western Balkan power markets closer to coupling with the EU’s single market.
Montenegro said it has completed harmonization with that same package and aims to close the relevant EU accession chapter by year’s end.
The pattern is consistent across all examples: formal legal alignment is moving faster than the infrastructure and institutional capacity needed to make it operational.
Infrastructure and Projects
The long-planned Southern Interconnection linking Bosnia and Herzegovina to Croatia missed its contract-signing deadline once again, stalled by an unresolved domestic dispute over which level of government owns the land the pipeline would cross.
By contrast, North Macedonia’s parallel gas link toward Greece continues to track its original schedule, with the responsible transmission operators confirming the project remains on course for completion next year as part of a wider corridor connecting national gas markets into the broader European network.
Wind development showed a similarly mixed picture. Regulators in Bosnia and Herzegovina approved one large wind project without requiring a full environmental review while rejecting a second for incomplete documentation, illustrating how uneven and discretionary the region’s permitting processes remain.
Kosovo initiated its first dedicated wind tender to add a meaningful new tranche of clean capacity to a power mix still dominated by two aging lignite plants.
Further out, Alcazar Energy confirmed plans to build more than 1.5 gigawatts of wind and solar assets across Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia, indicating that international capital remains willing to absorb early-stage permitting risks.
Serbia’s flagship pumped-storage hydropower project, Djerdap 3, drew political scrutiny after opposition highlighted repeated swings in its planned capacity and cost estimates over the past two years (1,800 MW or 2,400 MW; 1.4 billion EUR or 2.63 billion EUR?). Smaller-scale hydropower refurbishment is proceeding without controversy: the state utility has secured the permits needed to overhaul an aging plant in the south of the country as part of a longer modernization program, financed jointly with European development partners. A state-owned wind project intended to be the EPS’s first was again discussed with German backers and remains stalled on implementation.
Grid capacity, not permitting, is emerging as the key constraint on renewables. In Croatia, several hundred megawatts of solar and wind projects that hold grid-connection contracts remain unbuilt due to a lack of available capacity, a phenomenon system operators describe as “locked projects.”
Montenegro’s distribution operator flagged a comparable issue, warning that a wave of new solar connections, combined with recent extreme heat and a rise in illegal grid connections, is testing local networks built for a different era of demand.
The response across several markets looks the same: pairing new renewable capacity with battery storage from the outset, to smooth output for grid operators and to protect project economics from curtailment risk.
Energy Markets, Prices, and Investment Climate
A regional heatwave led to some of the most volatile power prices of the year. Hungary and Romania posted sharp spikes, with day-ahead prices briefly touching levels not seen since the depths of the 2022 crisis, driven by cooling demand and reduced output from nuclear plants forced to cut generation amid high river temperatures.
Serbia’s own wholesale price rose as the country swung from a net importer to a net exporter on the back of a hydro recovery, yet it remained below those of Hungary, Romania, and Croatia. This is the pattern that makes Serbian and Bosnian exports commercially attractive whenever northern markets become more expensive. Greece and Bulgaria moved the opposite way, with strong renewable output pulling their prices down and reinforcing their role as the region’s price-moderating markets.
Underneath these daily changes, market participants are increasingly focused on a more structural issue – the widening gap between midday solar oversupply and evening scarcity. This is recognized as a key commercial risk for renewable investors. This gap is beginning to reshape how power purchase agreements are priced, particularly in Serbia, Croatia, and Montenegro, where battery storage is shifting from a nice-to-have to a precondition for financing new solar capacity.
Distribution-level bottlenecks are adding to the problem, constraining the growth of small-scale solar and prosumer schemes even where wholesale market rules are supportive.
However, investment sentiment remains constructive – where the underlying case is strong. Croatia’s state utility and several private energy groups collectively outlined multi-billion-euro projects planned for grid modernization, battery storage, geothermal energy, and green hydrogen.
The signal from these announcements is that strategic investors are treating the region’s grid and storage bottlenecks as opportunities rather than barriers.
That confidence sits alongside a less optimistic reality for several governments: Kosovo, Serbia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina face the prospect of losing meaningful EU support this year over unmet reform conditions – a reminder that political risk is often the binding constraint on the region’s energy transition.
EU and Global Context
At the EU level, the bloc’s phase-out of Russian gas is proving slower than its legal timetable suggests: Russian pipeline and LNG volumes into the EU actually rose in the first months of the year as suppliers front-loaded deliveries ahead of tighter restrictions due in 2027, with Hungary and Slovakia still relying on long-term contracts.
The same heatwave straining the Western Balkans prompted intervention from Brussels, with a senior Commission figure framing extreme heat as evidence that the green transition should accelerate rather than slow down.
Globally, oil prices decreased over the week as tensions around the Strait of Hormuz cooled and Gulf supply normalized, while a separate international assessment projected that renewable capacity additions would more than double again by 2030, reinforcing the view that the region’s transition, however uneven, is moving in line with global trends.
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