Energy Community Implementation Report: A new energy landscape demands faster EU–Energy Community integration 

EU–Energy Community energy market integration pre-accession has become a mutual economic, climate, and security imperative

The 2025 Energy Community Secretariat Implementation Report lays out tangible progress in EU energy and climate alignment, signalling Contracting Parties’ growing role as reliable partners in a single, integrated European energy system. As reforms deepen, opportunities for greater competitiveness, larger and more liquid markets, and increased clean energy investment across the Energy Community are converging with a rapidly changing, carbon-constrained and security-focused European energy landscape. Together, the developments make integration with the EU’s internal energy market before accession both achievable and increasingly urgent. 

As the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) enters into force on 1 January 2026, deeper integration with the EU electricity market plays a key role in safeguarding decarbonisation gains and ensuring continued fair and efficient cross-border electricity market exchanges. In this regard, the report shows clear evidence of a real energy transition underway across the Energy Community consistent with the direction of Europe’s climate and decarbonisation policies. Carbon intensity is declining, renewables are expanding through competitive auctions, and National Energy and Climate Plans for 2025–2030 are nearing completion.  

Further progress on decarbonisation will increasingly depend on advances in electricity market integration, which can unlock market scale and financing beyond what smaller national markets can deliver alone. In this sense, the report finds that regulatory reforms and growing independence of system operators are bringing the region closer to full integration with the EU internal electricity market ahead of accession.

Such reforms must now accelerate: only Serbia and Moldova have completed full transposition of the Electricity Integration Package, a prerequisite for electricity market coupling before accession—and for exemption from CBAM on electricity trade. At the current pace, and subject to verification of compliance by the European Commission, the earliest market coupling can be expected in 2028. 

Europe’s gas market also now demands deeper integration between Energy Community Contracting Parties and EU Member States. As Russian gas is phased out, under the Fourth Gas Package, EU member states should apply network codes at all borders from August 2026, making consistent cross-border implementation by both Member States and Contracting Parties alike critical to diversification and energy security.

The report shows tangible progress in gas market reform in Serbia, Moldova, and North Macedonia. Building on this momentum, reforms now need to advance more evenly across the region. Improving how cross-border capacity is made available—particularly on routes such as the Trans-Balkan Pipeline—will be key to unlocking trade, competition, and supply diversification. 

Using a common set of indicators, the Energy Community Secretariat’s annual Implementation Report tracks how Contracting Parties are advancing in implementing the EU energy and climate acquis under the Energy Community Treaty. It is the Secretariat’s mandated tool under the Treaty to assess compliance, monitor progress, and support integration with the EU’s internal energy market.