Bulgaria fined state power company NEC for padding renewables' imbalance bills

Bulgaria's Commission for Protection of Competition found that NEC EAD, the state National Electricity Company, abused its dominant position on the electricity balancing market by imposing unfair trading conditions on renewable-energy producers. Since June 2014 the balancing market has been run by transmission operator ESO EAD, while NEC acts as public supplier and coordinator of the special balancing group for renewables and high-efficiency cogeneration.

The authority found NEC unilaterally and without grounds changed producers' forecast production schedules, creating imbalances and extra costs; distributed unjustified imbalance costs under its allocation methodology; and passed on imbalance costs that ESO had never reported and never charged to NEC. The extra burdens did not objectively reflect real system costs, so producers paid for imbalances that never existed.

The country's Supreme Court of Cassation had already ruled, in Decision No. 250 of 7 November 2018, that producers owe imbalance costs only when their own submitted schedules differ from actual production — and that NEC has no right to correct the schedules submitted to it.

Fine of BGN 315,612 (about EUR 161,422); affected renewable and cogeneration producers can sue NEC for compensation

NEC could rewrite producers' schedule inputs unilaterally, then bill the imbalances it created

Costs that the grid operator never recorded against NEC were nonetheless passed through to producers

Renewable producers had no route around the dominant balancing-group coordinator, so the unfair terms stuck

The conduct turned accounting discretion inside a state intermediary into an abuse of dominance

When a dominant intermediary bills customers for costs the system operator never charged it, that is not cost allocation — it is a private tax, and dominance makes it abuse.

The CPC imposed a penalty of BGN 315,612 (about EUR 161,422) under Article 21(1) of the Competition Protection Act. Once the decision enters into force, producers affected by the unfair practice can claim monetary compensation before the courts; the Supreme Court of Cassation's 2018 ruling already frames which imbalance costs producers actually owe.