Prime Minister Hristijan Mickoski has announced that the price of electricity for households could stay unchanged from January, and that the government is also working to bring it down. At the same time he gave assurances that the coming winter will pass without energy shocks and without disruptions to supply.

His arguments are specific: reservoirs are at around 50 percent, the thermal power plants are undergoing overhauls, the heating season is expected to start between 2 and 5 November, and a coal deal with Kosovo could reduce the costs of domestic production. On natural gas he said Macedonia is not a big consumer, so even with possible price rises on the European market the effect here would be small. Oil and fuel reserves, he says, are at a solid level.

An announcement is not a decision

That is the key distinction worth holding on to. What was said is a political and economic announcement - not an adopted tariff. Mickoski points out that calculations are being made and that a methodology allowing a lower final price is under consideration, but a methodology under consideration is not yet a methodology that has been adopted.

The price a household pays does not depend on one government decision. It includes the cost of purchased energy, domestic production, transmission and distribution costs, network losses, the operation of the universal supplier and regulatory decisions. The government can influence part of that. Exchange prices - it cannot.

Cheaper, or the load moved elsewhere?

Here is the question no announcement answers. A lower bill is good news only if its cost has not been moved somewhere else. If the low tariff is sustained through financial support to energy companies, then part of that cost is paid by citizens again - just indirectly, through the budget.

A real and lasting price drop requires greater domestic production, reduced technical losses, timely maintenance of capacity, investment in renewables and storage, and transparent procurement. Without that, every favourable price stays exposed to market and political shifts.

The test comes after New Year

The announcement that there will be no energy shocks creates a sense of security. But a feeling is not a bill. The most important information will not be the political statement but the final decision on tariffs and the amount citizens see on their bills after New Year.

Particularly exposed are lower-income households and those using electricity as their main heating source. For them a difference of a few percent is not statistics - it is whether the whole flat gets heated or just one room.