Ever higher prices, ever less gas: Germany is heading for an uncomfortable winter because of the effects of Putin’s Ukraine war. Do people have to freeze again in the cold season? FOCUS Online shows what the federal government is doing to prevent this – and whether the measures are really sufficient.
Putin’s ambush war against Ukraine has painfully demonstrated how fatal the dependency on Russian gas is for our energy supply, into which Germany has maneuvered itself in recent years. The first real turning point was the activation of “Stage 2” of the “Gas Emergency Plan”, which Federal Economics Minister Robert Habeck (Greens) announced on June 23. Habeck was reacting to cuts in Russian gas supplies to 40 percent of the agreed volume.
Just under a month later, the federal government is even warning the Prime Ministers of the 16 federal states that as early as next autumn, i.e. in just two months, an “emergency in the gas supply” could arise in individual regions. The reason: The government of Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) assumes that Russian President Vladimir Putin will continue to reduce the gas flow after ongoing maintenance work on the “Nord Stream 1” pipeline under pretense of technical pretexts.
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But what is the federal government currently planning to prevent supply bottlenecks from causing people in Germany to freeze for the first time since the Second World War?
The good news first: Despite low levels in Germany’s gas storage facilities, it currently looks as if neither private households nor important public facilities such as hospitals will be affected by supply bottlenecks. The prerequisite for this, however, is that Putin opens the gas tap on “Nord Stream 1” again on Thursday after the end of the maintenance work and delivers at least the 67 million cubic meters instead of the agreed 167 million per year.
The bad news: So far it has not been clarified who will pay for the extreme gas price increases. If the energy companies pass on the inflation rates to private consumers, there will probably be considerable financial bottlenecks in many households in Germany, as a result of which thousands upon thousands of German citizens would have to freeze – with serious consequences for their health. If companies don’t pass on inflation rates, many of them are at risk of bankruptcy. In order to prevent both dramatic scenarios, the state would have to intervene.
The glimmer of hope: There is a willingness to help gas suppliers. This was recently shown by the difficulties of the gas supplier Uniper. After a call for help to Chancellor Scholz, the federal government declared that the state would support “critical infrastructure companies in the energy sector”. A stabilization fund, like the one set up because of the corona pandemic, is under discussion.
One of these “accelerations” could be cooperation with Egypt. During a visit to Berlin on Monday, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi offered Germany and Europe closer cooperation to secure energy supplies. Scholz said he spoke with Al-Sisi about long-term joint projects in the energy sector, about hydrogen and the shift to renewable energies, but also about “exploiting and expanding the diversification options for supplying gas to Europe and Germany in the very short term”. .
“The gas production in the east of the Mediterranean could be shipped to Europe through Egypt and exported,” said al-Sisi. “If we can play a role here to mitigate the crisis, then we would do so immediately.” The high energy prices also placed a burden on the Egyptian population, emphasized Al-Sisi.
This is also necessary in order to be able to continue supplying gas to those industrial sectors that cannot do without this energy source for electricity generation for technical production reasons. However, this does not change the goal of phasing out coal by 2030.
The savings that can be achieved can be considerable in some cases. According to the Federal Association of German Housing and Real Estate Companies (GdW), ten percent of the energy can be saved simply by doing without tilted windows and using an energy-saving shower head. If the legislature were to reduce the minimum room temperature to 16 to 18 degrees “in an emergency”, according to the GdW, up to a third of the gas bills could be saved.
However, there are no specifications for minimum room temperatures in rented apartments and houses. However, case law has resulted in certain minimum values for the room temperature to be guaranteed by the landlord. Depending on the judgement, they are between 20 and 22 degrees during the day and between 17 and 18 degrees at night. All planned restrictions on heating should be based on this. The first housing companies such as Vonovia have already announced that they intend to reduce the heating temperatures for their own tenants, at least at certain times.
In addition, a “gas auction model” with a bonus system in the industry this summer should offer incentives to save gas and to be able to sell the surplus on the German market unbureaucratically.
Should Putin, as feared, further reduce the 40 percent of the agreed gas delivery volume or turn off the gas tap completely, this would certainly lead to a drastic worsening of the gas emergency in Germany. Habeck should then be forced to declare the third and thus highest “emergency level”. The state and the Federal Network Agency could then intervene directly in the energy distribution and determine who gets how much gas and who doesn’t. And the framework conditions for austerity measures could then be regulated more strictly from the autumn. So the shaking is far from over.
With dpa
