Iron Gate at 20% as Serbia's power use hits winter level

The Iron Gate 1 hydro plant on the Danube is now sending out little more than 5,000 megawatt-hours a day, roughly a third of what it normally delivers, at the same time Serbia’s electricity demand is set to reach 100 to 105 gigawatt-hours a day from next week. In an ordinary year that is a mid-January reading, not an August one.

The Danube story we have been tracking since the gauge at Novi Sad fell to minus 139 centimeters, four centimeters short of the 1909 record, has stopped being a hydrology item. Water missing from the gauge is water missing from the turbines.

Inflow well below the biological minimum

The river is currently carrying about 1,600 cubic meters per second. The biological minimum, the level below which the plant has no operating room left, is 2,350 cubic meters per second. The gap of roughly 750 cubic meters every second translates straight into lost generation.

Davor Maljokovic, production director at the Iron Gate plant, said the units are running at reduced capacity but will not be shut down. The plant is using 20 to 30 percent of its available power.

“Inflow is currently around 1,600 cubic meters per second,” Maljokovic said, adding that this is half the seasonal average.

This is not one bad week. May and June 2026 were the weakest production months since the plant began operating, and 2025 was already the worst year on record for both inflow and output. Two dry years back to back have eaten the buffer that would matter most right now.

How much of demand does the plant actually cover?

Iron Gate 1 and Iron Gate 2 together deliver about 7,000 megawatt-hours a day, or seven gigawatt-hours in the unit used to measure consumption. Against the 100 to 105 gigawatt-hours of daily demand now forecast, the whole Iron Gate complex covers roughly seven percent of what the country burns through in a day, far below its share at full inflow.

Mining and Energy Minister Dubravka Djedovic Handanovic put a figure on the jump rather than a description.

“We expect electricity consumption to rise as early as next week to 100 to 105 gigawatt-hours per day,” the minister said.

The comparison that number invites is a winter one. At peak winter load, daily consumption runs at 110 to 115 gigawatt-hours. Summer has closed to within five to ten gigawatt-hours of the January peak, with temperatures forecast to reach 40 degrees Celsius. The minister added that “at this moment there is no risk of overloading the grid.”

Kostolac and Cernavoda: cooling as the bottleneck

The water shortage does not stop at hydro. Cooling systems at the thermal plants in Kostolac are operating under strain and their output has been reduced, precisely when they would be expected to cover what the Iron Gate cannot.

The same constraint is visible across the border. Romania’s Cernavoda nuclear plant has taken both reactors offline for lack of cooling water, pulling a serious block of baseload out of the regional market. That matters because a shortfall on days like these is not covered from domestic capacity alone, and everyone on that market is short at the same hour.

What the government and EPS are saying

Prime Minister Djuro Macut addressed the public on July 31 and said the power system is under control, while calling the next twenty days particularly important. He said Elektroprivreda Srbije (EPS) and Elektromreza Srbije (EMS) are monitoring the system daily.

EPS also published a set of household measures, all of them aimed at shaving the daily peak:

• switch on the water heater before use instead of leaving it powered around the clock
• air-dry laundry rather than using a tumble dryer
• unplug chargers when they are not in use
• set the refrigerator thermostat to no more than 4 degrees Celsius

The arithmetic behind that advice is plain. With the Iron Gate at a third of its output, every gigawatt-hour not consumed during the afternoon peak is a gigawatt-hour that does not have to be generated or bought. The next things to watch are the demand forecast for the coming week and the Danube inflow reading, which together will show whether the twenty days the prime minister flagged pass without consequences for the system.