The gas storage facilities are full, although the Kremlin has stopped deliveries to Germany. But the supplies alone are not enough to get through the winter.
Winter is approaching, the German gas storage facilities are almost full. But are the supplies sufficient to get through the cold season?
This mainly depends on three factors. On the one hand, it is crucial how cold and how long the winter will be. On the other hand, it depends on how much gas consumption is saved. And then it plays a big role how much gas will flow to Germany in the coming weeks.
The storage should help to ensure that there is sufficient gas available in this country during the heating season. Currently they are 95 percent full together. Some assets are above this statutory target for November 1, while others are below. The most important storage facility in Rehden is only used to about 84 percent, but will continue to be filled. According to the federal government, in purely mathematical terms, completely filled gas storage tanks are sufficient to cover the demand for two and a half winter months, which are cold on average.
According to the Energy Storage Initiative (INES) – an association of operators – on cold winter days, up to 60 percent of the gas supply in Germany is covered by the storage facilities. The rest is imported. After Russia completely stopped its deliveries, Germany gets its gas mainly from Norway. Germany also gets gas from pipelines from the Netherlands and Belgium.
Gas has also been flowing from France since yesterday, Thursday. According to the French energy regulator, the line can pump up to 100 gigawatt hours a day. Germany currently imports a total of around 3,000 gigawatt hours every day. The share from France is therefore a good three percent. “But every cubic meter counts,” says Frank Dietzsch from the German Technical and Scientific Association for Gas and Water (DVGW).
The situation could improve when the first floating liquefied gas terminals go into operation in Wilhelmshaven and Brunsbüttel this winter, thereby making additional import capacities available. The special ships can take liquefied natural gas from tankers and turn it into gas again on board. It is then to be fed into the supply network and distributed further via pipelines.
It still looks as if the winter will be mild. “According to the experimental long-term forecasts of the American weather service NOAA, it should be too warm or significantly too warm for the next six months up to and including March,” says ntv meteorologist Björn Alexander. The exception is December, which current trends predict to be average.
However, this does not change the fact that, according to the federal government, consumption must be reduced in order to avoid a situation in which energy would be rationed for the economy. “We will hardly be able to avoid a gas emergency in winter without at least 20 percent savings in the private, commercial and industrial sectors,” says the head of the Federal Network Agency, Klaus Müller. It doesn’t matter how warm or cold the winter gets.
Calculations published by the Science Media Center also show that it is probably not enough to rely solely on the gas already stored and other imports. “The result: without saving gas, all scenarios lead to a gas shortage over the course of the winter, even the optimistic ones,” it says.
At the moment it looks as if gas is actually being saved in Germany. According to the network agency, households and smaller companies consumed significantly less in the past week than in the comparable periods of the previous year. Müller justified this with the then relatively warm weather. In the week before, however, consumption was well above the level of the previous year.
Against this background, it is meaningful to set the gas consumption in relation to the prevailing temperature. According to the economic research institute DIW, consumption has increased in recent weeks – “but less than would have been expected due to the weather if customer behavior had not changed compared to last year.”
“We can see the first austerity measures,” says Müller. But these are all snapshots. “It’s not important now,” says Janis Kluge from the Science and Politics Foundation. “From November it counts.”