Karpoš municipality, Skopje. Part of Lovćenska Street will be without electricity for five hours today - from 8.30 to 13.30. At the same time, part of Leninova Street will be cut off from 8.30 to 15.30. And parts of the Centar municipality. Work on the distribution grid, EVN says.

That's standard procedure. When planned works on the infrastructure are scheduled, users should be notified at least one day in advance. In practice, the notifications reach only those who actively read traffic and municipal updates - older residents who don't use the internet rarely get them.

Five hours without power doesn't sound dramatic. But more and more people work from home. Doctors taking patients via telemedicine. Kids in online classes. Families with small babies. Fridges full of frozen meat. Alarm systems that don't work without power. All of this is part of today's reality.

For Skopje, this kind of outage is routine. The average city resident has 10-15 of them a year. EVN explains them with "necessary modernisation of outdated infrastructure". That's true. But at the same time - the modernisation has been going on for 15 years and is still not finished.

Even so, users still have to pay high prices for electricity. Since January 2026, our power bill has quietly grown by 30 percent compared to 2024. The price jumped sharply. The reserves are there. Brussels reports that "the situation is stable". The Skopje bill says something else.

The question worth asking is: where does the money for electricity that we pay actually go? When the infrastructure is still being upgraded, when outages are routine, when prices are rising - what is the alternative scenario? There isn't one. Users have no choice. EVN is a monopoly. That is the reality of the Skopje electricity market in 2026.