Coupling Energy Community power markets with the EU could bring gains of up to EUR 763 million a year, ACER finds 

Full regulatory alignment is the key to unlocking these gains, according to the Energy Community chapter of ACER’s 2026 electricity market monitoring report.

The EU Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators (ACER) has published its report “Progress of EU electricity wholesale market integration – 2026 Monitoring Report”. Based on 2025 market data, it identifies the Energy Community¹ as a significant opportunity to extend the benefits of an integrated electricity market beyond the EU’s borders. ACER estimates the potential gains at around EUR 763 million a year, ² while stressing that this is only an order of magnitude. The report was prepared with input from the Energy Community Secretariat and Energy Community National Regulatory Authorities.  

The gains would come from bringing the Energy Community into single day-ahead coupling (SDAC), the system that links Europe’s electricity markets for next-day trading. Market coupling ensures that cross-border power lines are used automatically and efficiently, sending electricity from where it is cheaper to where it is more expensive. Without it, cross-border capacity is often left unused or used in the wrong direction, so consumers pay more than necessary and producers lose access to neighbouring markets.  

The starting point for achieving these gains is for Energy Community Contracting Parties to fully transpose the Electricity Integration Package, the EU-aligned rules paving the way into the EU’s power market. Contracting Parties are working intensively on it. Four of them (Moldova, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia) have notified the transposition and reached the stage of a formal compliance check by the Energy Community Secretariat and the European Commission. Serbia was the first to complete the check, in May 2026. Progress can be tracked here.

Beyond regulatory alignment, closing these gaps will require more mature markets and more cross-border capacity made available. Apart from Serbia and Ukraine, Contracting Parties only set up day-ahead markets between 2023 and 2025, and liquidity is still building up. Cross-border capacity offered for trade has also remained broadly unchanged. ACER notes that coordinated regional capacity calculation and the EU requirement to make at least 70% of cross-border capacity available for trade would help bring prices closer together.

^{1The Energy Community brings together the EU and nine EU aspirants in South-East and Eastern Europe: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Kosovo*, Moldova, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia and Ukraine. All are committed to adopting EU energy rules even before joining the bloc.} 

^{2 Figures are indicative estimates. As ACER notes, the methodology and assumptions used may overstate actual welfare gains, potentially by up to a factor of two. They should therefore be read as an indication of scale rather than precise values.}