Energy Efficiency of an Apartment in Montenegro

Start with the number that explains everything else. According to Eurostat, a Montenegrin household paid 0.0998 euro per kilowatt-hour including all taxes in the second half of 2025, against an EU average of 0.2896 euro. That is the 2,500–4,999 kWh a year consumption band, the most common one. The Montenegrin price is 34.5 per cent of the European one.

What follows is predictable. When a kilowatt-hour costs ten cents, the difference in money between a good building and a bad one looks small, and nobody is willing to pay extra for it. The developer saves on insulation, the buyer never asks how thick it is, and the seller on the resale market often has no idea what the walls are made of.

The problem is that energy efficiency is not only about money. A badly insulated apartment by the sea means summer overheating, winter damp on the cold spots of the walls, and an air conditioner that runs all the time, dries the air and makes noise. The bill does stay low. You pay in comfort, not in euros.

And there is a second part. The price of electricity in Montenegro is regulated, not market-set. It has already risen and will keep being adjusted as the market converges with Europe. The apartment you buy today will stand for thirty years. Insulation, windows and orientation will stay the same — the price per kilowatt-hour probably will not.

We have already written about what it costs to run an apartment in Montenegro and what life here costs overall. This text is about something else: not how much you pay, but why exactly that much — and which part of it depends on the building itself.

On an EPCG bill the price per kilowatt-hour is not one number but the sum of four. The price list in force since 1 January 2026 lists them on separate lines, and it is worth understanding what you are paying for.

Active energy — the electricity itself. This is the only part you pay the supplier for as a commodity.

Network capacity charge — the fee for the distribution network holding capacity for you and delivering it to your meter. These tariffs are set not by the supplier but by the regulator: REGAGEN's decision on provisional prices for use of the distribution system in 2026 was adopted on 21 November 2025 and published in the Official Gazette of Montenegro no. 136/25.

Network losses — a line of its own. The electricity that dissipates on the way from the plant to your building is paid for by consumers.

Renewable energy support levy — an earmarked charge that funds support for solar and wind generation.

For a household with a two-tariff meter on low voltage, on the basic tariff model, it adds up like this: by day 5.2424 + 3.9178 + 1.9130 + 0.4730 = 11.5462 eurocents per kilowatt-hour excluding VAT. By night 2.6212 + 1.9589 + 0.9565 + 0.4730 = 6.0096. With 21 per cent VAT that becomes 13.9709 by day and 7.2716 by night. On top of that comes a fixed capacity charge of 0.6916 euro a month for a connected load of up to 8 kilowatts.

Note the proportion: the electricity itself is less than half the daytime price. Everything else is network, losses and levy. This matters for the payback calculation on solar panels, which we come back to below.

One more detail that surprises people arriving from northern Europe: there is no excise duty on electricity in Montenegro. The Excise Act does not list electricity among excisable goods, and you will not find an "akciza" line on an EPCG bill. There is exactly one tax here — 21 per cent VAT.

The night tariff in Montenegro is not a token discount but half the price: 6.0096 against 11.5462 eurocents excluding VAT.

The regulator sets the boundaries. In REGAGEN's General Conditions for the Supply of Electricity, article 8, the high tariff zone in winter runs from 07:00 to 23:00 and the low zone from 23:00 to 07:00. While summer time is in force everything shifts by an hour: high from 08:00 to 24:00, low from 00:00 to 08:00. Sunday is regulated separately: electricity supplied on Sunday from 00:00 to 24:00 is billed entirely at the low tariff.

The practical conclusion is dull but it saves money. Water heater, washing machine and dishwasher on timers, charging an electric car, and in the cold season storing heat in underfloor heating or a buffer tank — all of that costs half as much at night. Sunday is a cheap day end to end.

This is also where the first link to building quality appears. The night tariff only works for someone whose apartment can hold what it has stored. In an apartment with thin walls and a leaky envelope the heat stored overnight is gone by morning, and you top it up during the day at double the price. Thermal inertia is not a textbook abstraction; it is what turns the night tariff into a real saving.

There is a second, less well known fork in the bill. EPCG runs a permanent programme called "Zlatni tim". Members whose monthly consumption does not exceed 500 kilowatt-hours receive a 38 per cent discount on the value of the active energy billed.

Two conditions are usually overlooked. First: the list includes household-category customers with no outstanding debt for consumed electricity on the cut-off date; the most recent list was drawn up as of 31 January 2026. Second: the discount applies to active energy only, not to the whole invoice. The network share, losses and the renewables levy are not covered.

The scale of the programme shows in EPCG's own figures: 257,266 households were granted the status, but only 157,731 actually received the discount in the January 2026 billing. The gap between those two numbers is precisely the 500 kilowatt-hour limit — a hundred thousand households went over it.

For an apartment buyer this is one more argument for a building that does not need much energy. A decently insulated apartment stays under 500 kilowatt-hours a month without effort; an apartment heated through the winter by air conditioners at full tilt does not.

On the Montenegrin coast there is essentially no district heating and almost no gas in residential buildings. Heating means electricity: an air conditioner in heating mode, a heat pump, convectors, less often underfloor heating.

An important consequence follows for any calculation. In northern Europe the electricity bill and the heating bill are two different things, and energy efficiency mostly affects the second. Here it is a single bill, in which heating and cooling are mixed in with the fridge and the washing machine.

The Montenegrin code sets the heating season for the coastal zone from 15 October to 15 April. That is six months — half of continental Europe, but it is not "almost nothing" either. The mean January temperature in Bar is 8.3 degrees by the climate normal, the mean minimum 4.3. The apartment is meant to hold twenty. A difference of twelve to fifteen degrees persists for half a year, and it leaks through a bad wall continuously.

In summer the task inverts. By the same normal, Bar has 98 summer days with a maximum of 25 degrees or more and 13 tropical days with a maximum of 30 or more. There are 16 tropical nights a season, when the minimum does not fall below 20. We wrote about how the weather is distributed across the months in our review of Bar's climate.

Another feature: Bar has just seven frost days a year by the normal, and no ice days at all. That is decisive for choosing equipment, because a heat pump loses efficiency precisely in the frost that barely exists here.

Now to the document Montenegro designs by. The Rulebook on minimum energy performance requirements for buildings was published in the Official Gazette of Montenegro no. 47/2024 and has applied since 1 July 2024; article 29 repeals the previous edition, 75/15.

The first thing to know: the rulebook divides the country into three climate zones, and Bar belongs to the first — the mildest — together with Budva, Kotor, Tivat, Ulcinj, Herceg Novi, Podgorica, Danilovgrad, Zeta and Tuzi. The design outdoor temperature for that zone is minus 6 degrees, the annual mean 15.8.

For zone I the rulebook sets limit thermal transmittance values U, watts per square metre per kelvin. The lower the number, the better the assembly holds heat:

External walls — no more than 0.40. Roofs and ceilings under an unheated attic — 0.40. Floors over outside air and over a garage — 0.40. Walls against soil and floors on the ground — 0.50. Walls and floors against unheated spaces and stairwells — 0.65. Windows, balcony doors and transparent façade elements — 2.0. External doors — 2.90. Roller-shutter box — 0.80.

One line is almost never read: floors and walls between apartments — no more than 1.40. This is not about the street, it is about the neighbour. If the neighbour has left for the winter and is not heating, your warm apartment is heating his cold one through the shared wall.

There are aggregate requirements too. Article 6: the specific transmission heat loss coefficient of a residential building H*T must not exceed 0.80. Article 8: linear thermal bridges — no more than 0.2 watts per metre per kelvin. Article 18: if the apartment has underfloor heating, the floor beneath it must have a U of no more than 0.35. Article 19: if a radiator sits in front of glazing, the section behind it — no more than 0.9.

And this matters on the resale market: the heading of the limit-U table explicitly extends it to existing buildings after reconstruction. So a renovation has to bring the building to the same values, with pinpoint exemptions under article 7, paragraph 4.

Two requirements of the rulebook that make sense read together.

Article 11: the number of air changes per hour at a pressure difference of 50 pascals must not exceed n50 = 3.0 in buildings without mechanical ventilation and n50 = 1.5 in buildings with it. The test method is named in the rulebook itself — MEST EN ISO 9972, the blower-door test.

Article 20: the minimum number of air changes per hour where people are present is 0.5. Where nobody is present — 0.3. Paragraph 3 adds what matters most to an apartment buyer: in a multi-apartment building these requirements must be met for each apartment separately, not on average across the building.

Put the two together. The building must be tight enough that half an air change an hour physically cannot leak in through gaps. And at the same time it must deliver that half air change while people are inside. From the two requirements taken together follows a conclusion that appears nowhere in the text of the code: a tight building needs controlled ventilation. Not because it says so, but because otherwise the two requirements cannot be met at once.

We took that pairing apart in a separate article — why a seaside apartment feels stuffy, damp and noisy. Here the energy angle is what counts: air change is a cost item. Every cubic metre of fresh air has to be heated in winter and cooled in summer. In a building with heat recovery part of that heat comes back; in a building with a window vent it leaves entirely.

And the reverse: you cannot economise on air change. An apartment "insulated" to complete airtightness and left without ventilation turns into a greenhouse with condensation. Where that leads we covered in our article on mould in seaside apartments.

In Montenegro, energy efficiency is usually discussed as insulation. For the coast that is half the picture, and the smaller half.

The rulebook takes this into account. Article 9: a building that needs cooling in summer must meet the solar protection requirements of table 2 in annex 2. The requirement is framed through the glazing share: if the glazing factor fw is 0.4 or more, the total solar energy transmittance g_tot in the summer period must not exceed 0.25. Below that glazing share there is no requirement.

The key word is total. What counts is the transmittance of the glazing together with the shading device in the closed position. And here table 3 of annex 2 gives the numbers that make the whole document worth reading.

A double-cavity argon-filled glazing unit with a thermal transmittance of 1.1 transmits 0.64 of the solar energy on its own. With internal blinds — 0.42. With external white blinds at 45 degrees — 0.11.

The difference between internal and external protection is nearly fourfold, and the physics is simple. Internal blinds stop the light only after it has passed through the glass and turned into heat inside the room. External ones do not let it in at all.

The practical conclusion for a buyer: if the south or west façade has large windows and nothing is provided outside them — no roller shutters, no awnings, no projecting canopy, no deep loggia — the air conditioner will spend the summer working against the sun rather than against the heat. The code can formally be satisfied with internal blinds only at a small glazing share; at fw of 0.4 and above, internal blinds with their 0.42 do not fit inside the 0.25 requirement.

This is also the answer to why old Mediterranean houses look the way they do: deep reveals, shutters on the outside, canopies. We wrote about that in our piece on why a façade that looks good today is not always beautiful twenty years on.

Now for the equipment. Every split system imported from the European Union carries two numbers — SEER and SCOP. Their meaning is worth understanding, because they translate directly into your bill.

SEER is the seasonal energy efficiency ratio in cooling mode. SCOP is the same thing for heating. Both are defined in EU Regulation 206/2012 as the ratio of the seasonal cooling or heating demand to the seasonal electricity consumption.

The difference from the familiar EER and COP is fundamental. EER and COP are single points under fixed test conditions: 35 degrees outside and 27 inside for cooling, 7 and 20 for heating. SEER and SCOP are calculated across a whole season broken into temperature bins, accounting for part-load operation and for standby, crankcase heater and off modes. The methodology is the harmonised standard EN 14825.

That is precisely why an inverter split system usually has a noticeably higher SEER than EER: for most of the season the machine runs below full output, and at part load the inverter is more efficient.

What the number means in money. SEER 4.0 means that for every kilowatt-hour of electricity the machine moves four kilowatt-hours of heat outside over the season. SEER 8.0 means eight. With the same apartment and the same summer, the cooling bill differs by a factor of two.

Now the figure worth knowing when buying equipment in Montenegro.

Regulation 206/2012 sets not a recommendation but a threshold. Since 1 January 2014 a reversible split system below 6 kilowatts may not be placed on the EU market if its SEER is below 4.60 or its SCOP below 3.80. For units from 6 to 12 kilowatts the SEER threshold is 4.30 with the same SCOP of 3.80. For equipment using a refrigerant with a global warming potential of no more than 150 the requirements are ten per cent milder.

Compare that with the class scale from the labelling regulation 626/2011. Class A for cooling is SEER from 5.10 to 5.60, class A+ from 5.60 to 6.10, A++ from 6.10 to 8.50, A+++ from 8.50 up. For heating, class A is SCOP from 3.40 to 4.00, A+ from 4.00 to 4.60, A++ from 4.60 to 5.10, A+++ from 5.10 up.

Hence a simple rule. The minimum permitted SEER of 4.60 falls into class B. Which means a new split system worse than class B is physically not sold on the European market, and a pretty "A" sticker in the shop window is not an achievement but the lower part of the permitted range. Aim for A++ and above.

A note on Montenegro. The country is not in the European Union, but ecodesign requirements do apply: the Rulebook on ecodesign requirements for air conditioners and comfort fans was published in the Official Gazette of Montenegro no. 81/17, and article 48 of the Energy Efficiency Act explicitly prohibits placing on the market products that fail ecodesign requirements. In practice most equipment on the Montenegrin market is imported from the EU and carries the European label.

A subtlety equipment sellers usually leave out.

SCOP is always quoted for a specific heating season. The regulation defines three: "warmer" with a design temperature of plus 2 degrees, "average" with minus 10 and "colder" with minus 22. The reference cities are set not by the regulation itself but by the standard EN 14825: Athens for the warm season, Strasbourg for the average one, Helsinki for the cold one.

The label must show the value for the average season — that same Strasbourg. The warm and cold ones the manufacturer may quote or may not.

Now compare. The design outdoor temperature for Montenegrin zone I, which includes Bar, is minus 6 degrees. The coast does not reach Strasbourg's minus ten, and it is not that far from Athens's plus two. Bar has seven frost days a year and no ice days.

Conclusion: the catalogue "average" SCOP is an understatement for an apartment on the Montenegrin coast. Real seasonal efficiency will be higher, because the machine almost never operates in the coldest bins where it loses output. If the manufacturer publishes a SCOP for the warm season, that is the more relevant one for Bar.

Let us be honest about the limits of this: no EU document formally ties countries to climate zones. This is a comparison of design temperatures, not a quotation from the code.

From the previous section follows something that is arguable for northern Europe and is not for Montenegro.

A heat pump is a machine that does not produce heat but moves it from outside to inside. Its weak point is frost: the colder it is outside, the less heat there is out there and the more electricity goes into moving it. In a climate where winter means minus twenty, that ends in an auxiliary electric heater and a loss of the whole point.

In Bar the January minimum averages 4.3 degrees, and there are no ice days at all. The machine spends the entire winter in the range where it is most efficient.

The rulebook itself provides indirect confirmation. Annex 3, which describes the characteristics of the reference building, assigns an air-to-water heat pump with electric backup and underfloor heating on a 40/30 temperature curve as the heat generator for a residential building. That is what energy efficiency of new housing in Montenegro is measured against.

The low-temperature circuit here is not a detail but a condition. A heat pump is the more efficient the lower the flow temperature: pushing 35 degrees into underfloor heating is far easier for it than 70 into radiators. That is why "heat pump plus underfloor heating" works, while "heat pump plus old radiators" often disappoints.

If you are looking at an apartment in a new build, the question "what heat source is specified and what is the flow temperature" belongs to the set worth asking before signing, alongside the questions in our property inspection checklist.

A lot is said about the sun in Montenegro, usually without numbers. Let us take the numbers.

The calculation uses the European Commission's PVGIS for Bar's coordinates, the PVGIS-SARAH3 database, averaged over 2005–2023, a 1 kilowatt-peak installation, crystalline silicon, 14 per cent system losses, 35 degrees tilt, south orientation, free-standing mounting.

Annual output is 1,448 kilowatt-hours per kilowatt of installed capacity. Solar energy arriving on the plane of the module is 1,842 kilowatt-hours per square metre a year.

By month the picture is: January 82, February 86, March 118, April 132, May 146, June 153, July 168, August 163, September 134, October 113, November 78, December 75 kilowatt-hours.

The July-to-December ratio is 2.25. By incident radiation it is larger still, 2.52; the difference between those two numbers is summer overheating of the modules, which eats part of July's advantage.

Cross-check against an independent source: Global Solar Atlas gives 1,470 kilowatt-hours per kilowatt-peak a year for the same point at an optimum tilt of 34 degrees. The divergence from PVGIS is one and a half per cent, so the two calculations agree.

What a seasonality of 2.25 means in practice. In summer the array peaks exactly when the air conditioner is running — a coincidence in your favour. In winter, when you need heating, it delivers half as much. On the coast a solar array covers cooling far better than heating.

The "270 sunny days" deserve a separate word. That figure appears on the official website of the Bar municipality: "Sa prosječnih 270 sunčanih dana godišnje, Bar je jedan od najsunčanijih gradova Mediterana". The city does not publish the counting method, and the hydrometeorological service's climatology has no such parameter at all — what it has is sunshine duration, 2,524 hours a year by the 1961–1990 normal. Both figures are correct; they are simply different quantities.

A clause buyers of new builds almost never hear about, although it concerns their apartment directly.

Article 15 of the rulebook: in buildings located in climate zone I, the use of solar energy collectors to cover at least 15 per cent of the annual demand for domestic hot water is mandatory. The exceptions are technical infeasibility or economic unjustifiability.

Bar is zone I. So for a new residential building in Bar, solar preparation of hot water is not a developer's option but a requirement of the code.

Note the difference between a collector and a panel. A solar collector heats water directly and does so at an efficiency unreachable for photovoltaics: it does not turn light into electricity and then back into heat, it passes the heat straight to the carrier fluid. For hot water in a Mediterranean climate it is the simplest way to take a noticeable share off consumption.

Annex 3 of the rulebook, describing the reference building for zone I, explicitly specifies a bivalent solar storage tank and a solar contribution of 15 per cent. That is the level everything else is measured against.

The question worth putting to the developer: are collectors specified, where do they sit, whose is the storage tank — shared for the building or individual per apartment — and who maintains the circuit. An answer of "we will fit boilers" means the article 15 requirement has been closed in the design by one of the exceptions, and it is worth finding out which.

At Zen Gardens solar collectors for domestic hot water are part of the design — the article 15 requirement is met on the merits rather than closed by an exception.

Suppose you want to install panels. There are two blocks of rules here — energy and property — and the second usually turns out to be the harder one.

The energy part. The Act on the Use of Energy from Renewable Sources was published in the Official Gazette of Montenegro no. 082/24 of 23 August 2024; chapter VIII, articles 62–68, introduces the status of "customer-producer". The capacity limit is not an absolute figure but a link to the property: the installed capacity of a customer-producer's plant may not exceed the connected capacity of their property.

The settlement model is not classic net metering. The law introduces the concept of an "energy deposit": the positive difference between what you produced and fed into the grid and what you took out. Netting is annual, with a cut-off on 1 April for the preceding twelve months. So a summer surplus can cover a winter deficit within the year.

The property part. The roof of a multi-apartment building is not yours, even if your apartment is on the top floor. The Act on Property Relations, no. 019/09, article 166 classifies the roof as a common part of the building, and article 170 defines common parts as the joint indivisible property of all unit owners. Article 186, paragraph 4, requires, for works beyond routine maintenance, the consent of owners holding more than half of the total area of the separate parts of the building. That is a threshold by area, not by heads.

Plus an administrative condition: the Act on the Maintenance of Residential Buildings, no. 041/16, article 25, prohibits altering the external appearance of a façade by installing equipment without the permission of the local self-government authority.

How the assembly of unit owners works, who the manager is and how such decisions are taken we covered in a separate article — who manages the building in Montenegro. For the solar question the conclusion is single: an individual array on the roof of a multi-apartment building is not an equipment purchase but an approval procedure, and that is where you have to start.

Since 1 August 2024 Montenegro has applied the Rulebook on certification of the energy performance of buildings, published in the same issue of the Official Gazette of Montenegro, no. 47/2024.

What the certificate contains. Article 7 introduces seven classes from A to G. An important feature that sets the Montenegrin scale apart from the familiar European one: class boundaries are defined not in kilowatt-hours per square metre but as fractions of the reference building's indicator. Class A is no more than 0.35 of the reference, B 0.50, C 0.71, D 1.00, E 1.41, F 2.00, and G everything worse than twice the reference.

The indicator IP itself is the annual primary energy for heating, cooling, ventilation, hot water and lighting, divided by the conditioned floor area, in kilowatt-hours per square metre a year.

Who issues it and for how long. The certificate is issued by an authorised person entitled to carry out energy audits. It is valid for ten years. A building or part of a building may have only one certificate.

When it is mandatory. The Energy Efficiency Act, article 40, names investors in buildings under construction and reconstruction, public authorities and owners of buildings with high public occupancy — and, importantly for a private buyer, owners on sale and on letting. Article 42 explicitly obliges the owner to hand the certificate to the buyer and to show it to the tenant.

What Montenegrin law does not have. An obligation to state the energy class in a sale or rental listing — the line that exists in the European directive — is not provided for here yet. An A3-format placard in a visible place is mandatory only for the public sector and buildings with high public occupancy, not for residential ones.

Penalties. Article 53 provides for 3,000 to 20,000 euros for a legal person, 150 to 1,300 for a responsible person and 300 to 3,000 for an entrepreneur. A direct sanction for a private individual selling an apartment without a certificate is not apparent from the text of the law — that is our reading of the provision, not an official interpretation.

The practical meaning for a buyer is simple: they are obliged to hand you the certificate. If the seller says there isn't one, that is not a minor formality — it is a signal that less is known about the building than you are being told right now. What else is worth asking for we collected in our piece on 15 mistakes buyers make.

Let us add up the economics. The heating season on the coast is six months, cooling three to four. Electricity costs about ten cents including all taxes. Does that mean the difference between a good building and a bad one is negligible in money?

In the annual bill — yes, it is not large by European standards. Over the horizon of ownership — no, and here is why.

First. The price is regulated. It has already been revised and will converge with the regional level as the market integrates. We are not going to forecast a specific figure — that would be fortune-telling. But buying an apartment on the assumption that a kilowatt-hour will always cost ten cents is a bet, not a calculation.

Second. Energy efficiency does not convert only into the bill. It converts into how many hours a day the air conditioner runs — and therefore into noise level, into dryness of the air and into the working life of the equipment. We wrote about why microclimate matters more than distance to the sea — that is exactly the same argument, from the other side.

Third. Insulation, windows, orientation and external shading do not change. You will replace the air conditioner in ten years and the water heater in eight, but never the thickness of the insulation inside the wall. Everything to do with the building envelope is bought once, together with the apartment.

Fourth. It affects letting. An apartment that is stuffy in summer without the air conditioner permanently on gets reviews to match, and winter bills are discussed openly in long-term rental listings. We went through the economics of that in our articles on letting an apartment as a business and on long-term renting from the tenant's side.

And fifth, less obvious. The coastal climate is aggressive towards equipment: salt accelerates corrosion of outdoor units and their brackets. The fewer hours the machine runs, the longer it lives. How that works we wrote about in our text on why metal by the sea rusts so fast.

A set of questions worth asking while you are still choosing. All of them rest on what is set out above, and all of them have a verifiable answer.

Ask for the energy certificate. Since 1 August 2024 the owner is obliged to hand it to the buyer. Look at the class and the date of issue: a certificate is valid for ten years.

Ask about the thickness and type of insulation in the external wall. The zone I limit is a U of no more than 0.40. That is a verifiable number and it must be in the design documentation.

Ask about the wall to the neighbour. The 1.40 limit is a line of its own in the rulebook. In a building where half the apartments stand empty in winter, this is not theory.

Ask about the windows. The limit is 2.0 for zone I. While you are at it, ask about the solar energy transmittance of the glazing — for a south façade it matters more than the thermal transmittance.

Look at what is provided outside the windows. Roller shutters, awnings, external blinds, deep loggias, canopies. External protection gives 0.11 against 0.42 for internal. If there is nothing outside and the windows are large and south-facing, that will be expensive every summer.

Ask whether an airtightness test was carried out. The rulebook names MEST EN ISO 9972. In a new building it is worth asking whether the test was done and what n50 came out.

Ask about ventilation for each apartment. Article 20, paragraph 3, requires the standard to be met for each apartment, not on average across the building.

Ask about solar collectors. In zone I, article 15 requires the sun to cover at least 15 per cent of annual hot water demand. If there are none, ask which exception closes the requirement.

Ask about the heat source and the flow temperature. A heat pump with a low-temperature circuit and a heat pump with old radiators are two different bills.

Ask about the neighbours and how the building lives. A building people live in through the winter and a building that stands empty behave differently even with identical construction. How to judge that before buying we covered in our article on where in Montenegro it is better to live, and in the comparison of Bar and Budva.

Come in winter. In summer a building's energy efficiency shows only as stuffiness. In winter it shows immediately: in cold corners, in condensation on the reveals, and in how much the neighbours' air conditioners run. On what life here looks like out of season we have a separate honest text.

This article is about energy. Alongside it, several others are worth reading that cover the neighbouring questions.

If you are only starting to work out the purchase, read the general overview — how to buy an apartment in Montenegro, what apartments cost by city, what taxes you will pay on purchase and whether a foreigner gets a mortgage. Those planning to live here permanently will find the text on residence through property useful, and those who will come and go — the one on what happens to the apartment while you are away. And separately — what gets built here given the seismicity, because the structure and the thermal engineering are resolved by the same design. The mistake hardest to spot on a viewing we covered here, and a general overview of the city is in the guide to Bar.