Fearing Russia could cut off supplies of natural gas, the head of Germany’s energy regulatory agency called on residents Saturday to save energy and prepare for winter when usage surges.
Federal Network Agency President Klaus Mueller urged home and apartment owners to check and adjust their gas boilers and radiators to maximize their efficiency.
“Maintenance can reduce gas consumption by 10% to 15%,” he told Funke Mediengruppe, a German newspaper and magazine publisher.
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Mueller said residents and property owners should use the 12 weeks before cold weather hits to prepare. He said families should start talking now about “whether each room should be its usual temperature in the winter, or whether some rooms can be a little cooler.”
The call came after Russia cut gas flows to Germany, Italy, Austria, the Czech Republic and Slovakia earlier this month, as European Union countries scramble to refill storage facilities with the fuel used to generate electricity, the energy industry and to heat homes in the winter.
Russia’s state-owned energy company Gazprom blamed a technical problem for the reduced flow of natural gas through Nord Stream 1, a pipeline that runs under the Baltic Sea from Russia to Germany.
The company said equipment that was refurbished in Canada was stuck there due to Western sanctions over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
German leaders rejected that explanation, calling the reductions a political move in reaction to European Union sanctions against Russia after it invaded Ukraine.
Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck, who is also Germany’s economy and climate minister and responsible for energy, warned that a “blockade” of the pipeline is possible from July 11, when regular maintenance work is due to start. In previous summers, the job involved shutting down Nord Stream 1 for about 10 days, he said.
The question is whether the upcoming regular maintenance of the Nord Stream 1 pipeline will turn into “longer political maintenance,” the energy regulator’s Mueller said.
If the flow of gas from Russia “is to be reduced for a longer period of time, we will have to talk more seriously about saving,” he said.
According to Mueller, in the event of a gas supply cutoff, private homes would be specially protected, as would hospitals or nursing homes.
“I can promise that we will do everything we can to prevent private households from running out of gas,” he said, adding: “We learned from the coronavirus crisis that we should not make promises if we are not completely sure that we can keep them. .”
He said his agency “doesn’t see a scenario in which no more gas reaches Germany.”
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Also on Saturday, German chemical and consumer products company Henkel said it was considering encouraging its employees to work from home in the winter as a response to a possible supply shortage.
“Then we could greatly reduce the temperature in the offices, while our employees could heat their homes to the normal extent,” Henkel CEO Carsten Knobel told the Rheinische Post newspaper.
Earlier this month, Economy Minister Habeck activated the second phase of Germany’s three-stage emergency plan for natural gas supplies, warning that Europe’s largest economy was facing a “crisis” and that targets storage for the winter were at risk.
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