Balkan countries form company to boost electricity distribution

TIRANA, July 16 – Ten countries have signed an agreement to register a new company, the Co-ordinated Auction Office for Southeast Europe (SEE CAO), to distribute electric power throughout the region.
The company will be headquartered in Podgorica, its basic aim to ensure steady supplies of electricity to Albania, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), Macedonia, Greece, Montenegro, Romania, Slovenia, Kosovo and Turkey.
“For example, if Croatia wants to export electricity from Turkey, it must ask BiH, Montenegro, Bulgaria etcŠto do it. This will not be the case anymore. Croatia will get it directly from anywhere in SEE Šand it will not possible for one side to close the routes, as was the case this winter with Serbia which closed all its borders and nobody could [transmit] the electricity,” Aleksandar Mijuskovic, executive director of SEE CAO, told SETimes.
But this is not just about quantity. “The electricity we are going to use will have much better quality since the usable capacities will be 150 instead of the current 100,” Mijuskovic said. It’s good news to an area that sees more than its share of chronic power outages.
Intrinsic to this is the fact that the SEE CAO becomes a true indicator of market integration, as opposed to cross-border trade.
“We are talking about small, fragmented markets. This means lots of borders. The great number of borders, in combination with opposing transmission capacity auction mechanisms, make trading in the region a rather difficult undertaking,” Slavtcho Neykov, director of the Energy Community Secretariat on the establishment of the CAO in Vienna, told SETimes.
Consumers will have to wait two to three years to feel the first impact on prices “based on much better and easier electricity trade which will be provided by the CAO,” Mijuskovic predicted. The CAO also sends a strong political signal. “After the years of turbulence, we have ten TSOs that sit together and trade. To this end, I expect the other remaining TSOs to follow course,” said Neykov.