Building a Common Energy Future for the Western Balkans

The Western Balkans face a particular energy puzzle. Six national systems remain heavily dependent on a small number of legacy coal plants, while regional interconnection is technically present but commercially under-used. EU accession trajectories pull each system toward the same regulatory shore, but on differing timelines and from differing starting points. The result is a region where decarbonisation is officially shared and operationally national.

This working paper sketches the architecture of a credible regional energy compact — not a substitute for accession, but a framework that could survive its varying speeds. The compact would have three load-bearing elements: a joint capacity-adequacy assessment renewed every two years, a transparent regional reserve product accessible across borders, and a coordinated retirement schedule for the legacy coal fleet that is published in advance and treated as a regional liability rather than six national ones.

The Western Balkans cannot decarbonise as six separate systems. Whether it decarbonises as one is the open question.

Each of these elements has analogues elsewhere in Europe. The novelty here is the political envelope: a compact that is binding enough to be planned against but flexible enough to accommodate countries that are not yet inside the Internal Energy Market. The paper proposes a staged design with a soft pilot phase in 2026–2027 and hard commitments from 2028.

The paper concludes with seven recommendations addressed jointly to the Energy Community Secretariat, to the European Commission's DG ENER, and to national energy ministries. None of the seven require new financing — each is a coordination, transparency, or planning measure. Coordination is, in this case, the cheapest available decarbonisation instrument.