On 1 July 2025, Bulgaria enacted changes to the Electricity Trading Rules (ET Rules) that liberalise the nation’s electricity market and ensures market-based electrical-power prices for household consumers.
Bulgaria’s national utility regulatory authority, the Energy and Water Regulatory Commission (EWRC), adopted the amendments to its ET rules in June 2025 according to amendments made to the Bulgarian Energy Act mandated by EU Regulation 2019/943 and Directive 2019/944.
The most important amendments the Bulgarian Energy Act that impact the ET Rules include the following:
· the abolition of the National Electricity Company as the public electricity supplier.
· the abolition of the combined balancing groups and the balancing group of the public electricity supplier.
· the creation of a new methodology for the formation of balancing electricity prices, which is no longer part of the ET Rules.
· changes to the types of contracts available on the electricity market, such as the newly introduced contract for the provision of clearing services and the removal of the type of contract for combined balancing groups and the contract for compensation with premiums.
The consequences of these changes are many. With the disappearance of the public electricity supplier, end suppliers must now offer universal service without territorial boundaries. This also allows for the liberalisation of the retail market as a precondition for having competition among the suppliers of last resort to households.
The changes are also expected to optimise the functioning of the balancing market. For context, members of the former combined balancing groups, which consisted solely of producers of electricity from renewable sources, can join the two other remaining categories of standard and special balancing groups.
For more information on how changes to Bulgaria’s Energy Act may affect your business, contact your CMS client partner or these CMS experts: Kostadin Sirleshtov, Borislava Piperkova, Elena Yotova-Yordanova.
Petya Petkova contributed to this article.
