I found some more information: http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/government-pays-a-mi...

Since the end of the Kosovo war in 1999, the four northern Serb-majority municipalities have not paid Pristina for their energy consumption.

To make up for the shortfall, people from other areas of Kosovo had a percentage added to their bills to pay for the north’s electricity.

In December, the Energy Regulator’s Office announced that electricity bills will be reduced by 3.5 per cent as consumers will no more cover the cost of the four municipalities’ power as they have done for the past 19 years.

I imagine everyone was Bitcoin mining there and the bill was going thru the roof.

Would you believe me if I told you that because of the legal situation (Northern Kosovo does not pay any electricity), there have been tons of crypto mining operations that have sprung up. There are stories of Russians coming all the way to set up warehouses full of mining rigs and generate cryptocurrency using free electricity.

Source: I live here.

also (speculation):

raising this issue now (rather than earlier in the year) in response to the near-end of the syrian pipeline proxy war, bulgarias mysteriously financed repurchase of it's own gas lines from czech holding co, lavrov and gazprom ceo in belgrade unveiling giant mosaic, etc etc etc...

Thank you for this and the child comments, I've been looking for the tl;dr of the political explanation. While the discussions of network frequencies, generation, phases, and propagation were all very educational, HN couldn't see the forest for the trees. Fascinating that the bitcoin mining (an HN favorite) was involved.