Less than four months to go to the Trieste Summit, the Western Balkan 6 countries have reached the halfway point of meeting the 2015 Vienna Summit targets, which aim to create a regional electricity market. Even in the area of spot market establishment, where development was previously lagging behind, progress at both national and regional level has been made in the last monitoring period.
The initiative for day-ahead market coupling under the multi-stakeholder Western Balkan 6 Memorandum of Understanding on regional electricity market development continued to grow. The initiative now counts eight EU stakeholders from five Member States. At the national level, Montenegro finalized all necessary steps to register a company with the task to establish a day-ahead market. The Government of former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia took a decision to establish an organized electricity market and tasked the transmission system operator to prepare an action plan.
With respect to unbundling and certification of transmission system operators in line with the Third Energy Package, Albania was the first Western Balkan 6 country to finalise the certification of its transmission system operator OST, which consequently obtained membership in ENTSO-E. In the electricity market of Kosovo*, the last fully foreclosed market in the WB6, the process of deregulation started by phasing out regulation of the generation price and the price for high voltage customers.
Despite notable achievements in this reporting period, individual country progress is still heterogeneous and the speed at which national reforms will continue depends on various factors, hinging mainly on the WB6 governments’ decisions expected to be taken before the Trieste Summit.