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In Serbia’s industrial economy, electricity has quietly crossed a conceptual threshold. What was once treated as a stable production input—priced, contracted and accounted for much like water or basic logistics—has become a dynamic risk factor that shapes margins, operational decisions and long-term competitiveness. This shift is not the result of a single policy change or

For decades, Serbia’s industrial model was implicitly designed around a power system that rewarded constancy. Factories ran continuously, furnaces stayed hot, production lines avoided stops, and electricity flowed as a stable background input. This logic made sense in a system dominated by lignite-fired power plants and large hydropower assets. Baseload generation rewarded baseload consumption. Predictable

For most of the last two decades Serbia’s industrial competitiveness was framed around familiar variables: labour cost, tax stability, logistics access to the EU, and a reasonably priced electricity system anchored in domestic lignite and hydropower. Energy was important, but it was largely treated as a predictable input—cheap enough, stable enough, and rarely decisive on