By 2025, Romania and Bulgaria stood out in South-East Europe for the scale of their spot electricity trading. Monthly volumes on both exchanges regularly reached terawatt-hour levels, supporting price discovery across the eastern Balkans. Despite high turnover, neither market could absorb risk at scale.
OPCOM day-ahead volumes and regional price reference
In Romania, OPCOM ran one of the region’s most liquid day-ahead markets. Throughout 2025, monthly traded volumes consistently exceeded 1.4–1.6 TWh. The market was supported by a diversified generation mix including nuclear, hydro, wind, and gas.
This generation diversity produced a price signal viewed as credible and regionally relevant. Bulgarian participants, Serbian traders, and Greek counterparties monitored OPCOM prices as an indicator of eastern SEE fundamentals.
IBEX spot liquidity and cross-border optimisation
In Bulgaria, IBEX extended spot liquidity further. Monthly volumes frequently reached 2.2–2.4 TWh, while intraday trading surpassed 600 GWh per month. IBEX also attracted short-term optimisation activity tied to hydro balancing and cross-border arbitrage into Greece and Romania.
Even with higher spot activity, the ability to convert spot trading into forward risk management remained limited in both countries. Exchange-traded futures, where available, stayed thin and opaque.
Thin exchange forwards and migration to bilateral OTC
Forward hedging depth did not develop alongside spot dominance on either platform. Open interest was limited, tenor coverage was uneven, and execution capacity was insufficient for large industrial or utility portfolios. As a result, forward risk management referencing OPCOM or IBEX prices shifted largely to bilateral OTC arrangements.
Bilateral forwards enabled counterparties to lock in prices indexed to familiar spot references. At the same time, these structures introduced multiple layers of hidden cost reflected in credit risk premia, liquidity premia, and basis risk premia.
Measured hedge-cost gap versus Germany and Austria
In 2025, the embedded costs became measurable for industrial buyers in Romania and Bulgaria. They often paid an effective hedge price of 3–6 €/MWh higher than comparable consumers in Germany or Austria. This comparison was made even before accounting for network charges and taxes.
The difference was linked to structural limits in local markets’ ability to warehouse risk efficiently rather than generation costs alone. OPCOM and IBEX continued to generate clear spot price signals without translating them into scalable hedging instruments.
Risk priced but not absorbed across the eastern Balkans
The pattern described for 2025 was that risk was priced but not absorbed within the same trading venues. Instead of being retained locally through deeper forward products, it was pushed outward toward HUPX and further into core European futures markets with deeper liquidity pools.
By the end of 2025, market participants drew a clear distinction between the roles of the two exchanges. OPCOM and IBEX functioned as price formation hubs rather than hedging hubs, with transparency and immediacy tied to spot trading rather than long-term risk management.
The forward market gap remained tied to the lack of visible multi-tenor depth with anonymous clearing in Romania and Bulgaria. Until such depth is achieved, risk premia were expected to remain embedded in electricity costs across the eastern Balkans.
Elevated by virtu.energy