By the end of 2025, Southeast Europe (SEE) achieved significant milestones in intraday electricity trading, with volumes reaching unprecedented levels across Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, and Serbia. Market operators and policymakers heralded this surge as evidence of the region’s power market maturity. However, for risk managers and industrial buyers, the reality was starkly different; despite increased intraday liquidity, long-term price risks remained unmitigated.
The confusion arises from a misunderstanding between operational liquidity and risk-bearing capacity. Intraday markets are primarily designed to address short-term imbalances, enabling participants to adjust positions in response to fluctuating forecasts or unexpected outages. In 2025, these markets demonstrated exceptional performance, with monthly intraday volumes exceeding 600 GWh on IBEX, surpassing 1 TWh on HUPX, and achieving record highs on SEEPEX. This led to reduced balancing costs and enhanced real-time system stability.
Nevertheless, this operational efficiency did not resolve the fundamental challenge faced by industrial consumers and utilities: exposure to multi-month and multi-year price volatility. Intraday liquidity is transient; positions are opened and closed within hours without accumulating open interest. Once delivery occurs, the market resets, rendering any hedging ineffective as this liquidity dissipates rapidly.
This distinction became evident during periods of structural stress in 2025. For instance, when hydro output plummeted in parts of the Balkans or thermal units unexpectedly tripped, intraday markets responded efficiently but prices experienced significant volatility. While participants could rebalance their positions, the resulting price level shock propagated through market expectations, widening forward spreads and increasing basis volatility. Thus, while intraday liquidity managed operational shocks effectively, it inadvertently amplified informational risks.
This dynamic fostered a misleading sense of security among market participants who believed that enhanced intraday trading reduced overall risk through constant adjustments. In reality, it merely shifted risk temporally without eliminating it. The compression of volatility into shorter timeframes led to more frequent price spikes and dips without diminishing their magnitude over longer periods.
The implications for industrial consumers were substantial. Facilities optimizing their intraday positions still encountered annual cost deviations of ±10 €/MWh relative to budgeted hedge levels. For a 40 MW consumer, this translated into a variance of approximately ±3.5 million €, despite effective operational execution. While intraday optimization mitigated imbalance penalties, it failed to stabilize average power costs.
Utilities faced a similar paradox; although improved intraday trading lowered balancing costs and forecast error losses, forward margins remained volatile. Their earnings continued to be sensitive to weather conditions and cross-border congestion. The forward curve operated independently from intraday market conditions, influenced more by macro-level supply expectations than by real-time liquidity.
<pBy late 2025, advanced market participants began to reassess the role of intraday markets as operational shock absorbers, rather than financial risk mitigators. They recognized that while intraday liquidity enhances efficiency and alleviates system stress, it does not replace the need for robust forward markets capable of locking in prices months or years in advance with minimal basis risk. Consequently, long-term exposure remained fundamentally unchanged.
The critical takeaway from this experience is that market maturity should not be gauged solely by the speed of electricity trading but rather by the capacity to hold risk over extended periods. In Southeast Europe, while intraday liquidity has matured rapidly, long-term risk absorption has lagged behind. This confusion has led to overconfidence in hedging strategies and an underestimation of residual exposure. The lessons learned in 2025 have prompted a necessary reevaluation of operational excellence versus financial resilience within the region’s power markets.
