The government has decided that Macedonia will get a natural gas market operator, and the role will be performed by MEMO DOOEL Skopje - the same company that already organises the electricity market.

That is a choice for the integrated model: instead of a new body with its own management, budget and hiring, the existing operator gets an additional remit. The argument from the Ministry of Energy, Mining and Mineral Resources is practical - MEMO already has working IT platforms and experience in running an energy market, whereas a new operator would mean high administrative costs and a long set-up period.

What specifically has to be done

MEMO DOOEL Skopje is tasked with launching the procedure for establishing a natural gas market operator in line with the legislation, and with producing a comprehensive plan covering all the organisational, technical, IT, legislative and financial parameters.

The obligation worth remembering: at least once every three months, the company must report on progress to the government, the energy ministry, the finance ministry and the energy regulator. Which means this decision comes with a quarterly deadline for accounting for itself. Whether anyone reads that report is another matter - but a document exists that can be requested.

Why this is happening now

The answer is the steel lying in the ground. The Greece-Macedonia gas interconnector is under construction, and without a functioning market operator the gas flowing through it has nowhere to be traded. An interconnector without a market is a pipe with one entry point and one exit, where the price is set by whoever puts the gas in.

A market operator means the possibility of multiple suppliers, of exchange trading, of a price formed by supply and demand rather than by a single contract. That is the difference between gasification and an actual gas market - and until now Macedonia has had only one of them.

What we still do not know

The decision is a framework, not a date. There is no published deadline for when the operator will be functional, no figure for what setting it up will cost, and no information on when the first trade could take place. All of that is supposed to be in the plan MEMO has to produce.

There is also a question the institutions do not raise themselves: the same company will organise both the electricity market and the gas market. That brings savings, but also concentration - two strategic energy functions in one entity, with the same management and the same regulator above it. When those two markets start to intersect, and in energy they always do, it will matter who assesses the independence between them.