According to the network agency, the gas flows are currently distributed more or less evenly in Germany. If Russia turns off the gas tap, that would change. If the pressure dropped significantly in just one region, hundreds of thousands of gas boilers would suddenly be blocked.
According to the President of the Federal Network Agency, an unequal gas supply in Germany would have far-reaching consequences. “The moment the pressure in the gas network in a region falls below a certain minimum, the fuse in hundreds of thousands of gas boilers would suddenly kick in,” said Klaus Müller to the newspapers of the Funke media group. “They would have to be unlocked again manually by trained specialists if gas were available in the region again.” No one can want such a scenario, “because it would take a very long time to restore the gas supply. So it will always be the aim of the Federal Network Agency to order reductions in industrial consumption if necessary so that this scenario does not occur.”
According to Müller, the gas flows in Germany have so far been more or less evenly distributed. “That could change if we only received gas from Norway, the Netherlands or Belgium,” says Müller. A new North-South responsibility would therefore have to be shouldered. Therefore, the reservoirs are already being filled so that the south can also be adequately supplied. “For example, we are currently not only focusing on the largest German storage facility in Rehden in Lower Saxony, but also on the storage facility in Wolfersberg in Bavaria.”
Industry President Siegfried Russwurm had previously warned of an uncontrolled failure of the gas supply. “The idea that there could be a priority switch for private households at the Federal Network Agency is wrong,” he also told the Funke media group. There is no empirical value as to how the gas network would react if the gas was massively fed in from the north and west instead of from the east. “I’m not sure how much of it arrives in the south. Physics has an important say.”
