Europe’s core industrial economies are increasingly constrained. High and volatile energy prices, dense regulatory frameworks, urban saturation, community resistance to new heavy industrial assets and long political cycles make it progressively harder for Western and Northern European states to host the industrial expansion Europe claims to need. At the same time, the continent demands more...
Energy markets are often analysed as abstractions: prices, curves, spreads, marginal costs. Infrastructure appears in these models as a constraint, a background condition that occasionally matters during outages or extreme events. In Europe’s integrated energy system, this framing is no longer sufficient. Infrastructure is not a passive backdrop. It is an active force that shapes...
South-East Europe does not sit on the periphery of Europe’s energy system. It sits at its edge in a different sense: the edge where constraints bind first, where volatility appears earliest, and where systemic assumptions are tested under real operating conditions rather than in models. The region is not an exception to Europe’s energy transition....
Energy trading was once about exploiting inefficiencies. Price differences across regions, fuels, or time horizons were treated as opportunities for arbitrage. Volatility was episodic, correlations were imperfect, and diversification across markets offered protection. In that world, successful trading meant predicting price direction more accurately than competitors and executing efficiently. In Europe’s current energy system, that...
For decades, energy economics was built around capacity. Installed megawatts, pipeline diameters, storage volumes, and reserve margins were treated as the primary indicators of system strength. If capacity exceeded peak demand with an adequate buffer, stability was assumed. Prices might fluctuate, but the system was fundamentally secure. That logic no longer holds. In today’s European...
For much of the past two decades, oil was treated as a declining force in Europe’s electricity story. As power generation moved away from fuel oil and toward gas, nuclear, and renewables, oil was conceptually pushed to the margins of energy analysis. It remained central to transport and geopolitics, but increasingly absent from discussions about...
For much of Europe’s post-liberalisation energy history, volatility was understood as a cyclical phenomenon. Prices rose and fell in response to identifiable triggers: cold winters, supply outages, geopolitical events, or demand surges. These episodes were disruptive but temporary. Once the shock passed, markets reverted to a familiar equilibrium, and volatility receded. Risk management, regulation, and...
The European Union’s progressive expansion of the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) is redefining industrial location strategy. No longer a limited carbon levy on select commodities, CBAM now functions as a system-level filter that integrates electricity systems, mining inputs, and manufacturing into a single regulatory and economic framework. As CBAM moves downstream, it increasingly influences...
The EU’s expansion of the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) into downstream manufactured goods represents a structural shift for the mining and metals sector. What began as a carbon levy on a narrow set of commodities is evolving into a value-chain instrument that links extraction, processing, and fabrication into a single carbon-accounted continuum. For mining-linked...
The latest CBAM draft confirms what industrial and power-market analysts have long suspected: electricity is no longer a peripheral factor in carbon pricing—it is becoming the structural backbone through which CBAM transmits cost, risk, and compliance across manufacturing value chains. The EU’s expansion of CBAM to finished and semi-finished steel and aluminium products formalizes a...
