After the Pipeline: Energy Security and Price Transmission in Southeast Europe
Diversified supply has not delivered stable prices. This paper traces how global shocks still reach Balkan households within a single quarter.
Southeast Europe has spent a decade diversifying its gas supply, and by most structural measures the effort has succeeded. New interconnectors, expanded LNG capacity and reverse-flow arrangements have removed the single-supplier vulnerability that defined the previous era.
Diversification is not insulation
What diversification has not delivered is price stability. Because regional markets now price off the same European hubs, a disruption anywhere in the system transmits to Skopje, Tirana and Sarajevo almost as quickly as it does to Rotterdam. The vulnerability has changed shape rather than disappeared.
Household exposure is amplified by two structural features: a high share of energy in the consumption basket, and limited scope for substitution in the housing stock. Efficiency investment, not supply diversification, is where the remaining gains sit.
Policy implications
Regional coordination on storage obligations and a common approach to vulnerable-consumer protection would do more for price resilience than any further supply project currently on the table.