Serbia is moving towards an electricity market model in which companies could purchase power from one supplier while allowing a separate aggregator to monetise their flexible consumption, creating a new layer of competition between industrial customers and wholesale electricity markets.
The Energy Agency of the Republic of Serbia, AERS, is finalising consultations on rules governing supplier and aggregator switching, with the consultation closing on September 30. The draft rules cover changes of aggregator even where a customer already has a full electricity supply contract.
The significance of the proposed framework goes beyond the switching procedure itself.
Serbia’s Energy Law already defines an independent aggregator as an aggregator that is not affiliated with a customer’s electricity supplier. It allows aggregators to participate in electricity markets without the consent of other market participants and protects customers using independent aggregators from unjustified charges, penalties or contractual restrictions imposed by suppliers.
The new rules could provide part of the operational framework needed to turn these legal rights into a functioning, customer-facing business model.
Under the emerging model, an industrial company could continue purchasing electricity from its existing supplier while contracting a separate company to manage and monetise its flexible consumption.
The aggregator could combine controllable equipment across multiple customers and offer the resulting portfolio into markets where flexibility has commercial value.
Potential resources extend well beyond conventional power generation, creating opportunities to use existing industrial infrastructure in new ways.
Industrial refrigeration, water pumping, furnaces, electric boilers, HVAC systems, cold-storage facilities, onsite generation and, eventually, commercial EV fleets could be grouped into portfolios capable of increasing or reducing demand in response to market conditions.
This effectively creates two separate electricity relationships.
The supplier manages energy procurement and billing, while the aggregator manages flexibility and demand-side optimisation.
For Serbian industrial consumers, that distinction could eventually turn equipment already installed inside factories into a source of additional revenue, without requiring customers to establish their own electricity-trading operations.
A plant capable of reducing 2 MW of consumption for a limited period, for example, may have little reason to build its own trading operation. An aggregator combining dozens of similar sites could instead create a portfolio large and reliable enough to participate commercially in electricity markets.
Scale is therefore central to the business model.
Individual loads may be too small or too unpredictable to trade efficiently. Aggregation converts them into a virtual energy resource that can be forecast, dispatched and measured as a single portfolio.
The value of the aggregator consequently lies less in ownership of physical assets and more in contracts, software, telemetry, forecasting and market access.
That could attract a new group of participants into Serbia’s electricity sector, including specialised aggregators, energy-service companies, technology providers and existing suppliers establishing separate flexibility businesses.
It may also intensify competition for industrial customers.
Electricity suppliers have traditionally competed primarily through commodity pricing, contract structures and balancing conditions. Aggregation introduces another commercial proposition: how much additional value can be extracted from a customer’s consumption profile?
A supplier might therefore offer energy supply together with flexibility optimisation, while an independent aggregator could argue that separating the two services creates stronger competition and potentially greater value for customers.
Several market elements still need to mature before Serbia can develop a liquid independent-aggregation sector.
Metering, baseline calculation, verification, balancing responsibility, data access and technical requirements for individual market products will determine how easily aggregated demand can participate in different electricity-market segments.
The Energy Law already places balancing responsibility on aggregators for deviations they cause.
That is important because aggregation cannot work commercially if customers can simply promise flexibility without being able to measure and verify actual delivery.
The emerging market will therefore require increasingly granular metering, reliable data and automated control systems.
For larger industrial consumers, this could link directly with energy-management systems already used to monitor production, electricity costs and onsite generation.
Over time, the aggregator could become the interface between those internal energy systems and external electricity markets.
The AERS switching framework will not create an independent aggregation market overnight.
But it addresses one of the basic commercial questions required for independent aggregation: can a customer change its flexibility provider without changing the company that supplies its electricity?
As that separation becomes operational, Serbia moves closer to a market where electricity consumption itself can be contracted, aggregated and traded as a separate energy service.
