By Nicholas Earl
Germany will struggle to reach its November targets for gas storage levels this winter, warned the country’s energy regulator.
It has already hit its first target for gas storage facilities to be 75 per cent full by September, and is now aiming to top up storage to 85 per cent by October and 95 per cent by November.
These goals were established by the country’s government to avoid an energy crisis this winter.
Klaus Mueller, the head of the Bundesnetzagentur, revealed that he did not expect Germany to meet its future storage goals as easily as
Mueller told t-online: “I don’t expect we will achieve the next storage targets as quickly as the first one.”
He argued that the 85 per cent target is “not impossible, but very ambitious”, especially if heating is already being used by October.
The energy chief also warned that Europe’s biggest economy faced two tough winters, with high energy prices expected to be sustained through 2023.
Germany is currently in the second phase of a three-stage emergency plan to reduce its dependence on Russian gas due to the war in Ukraine.
This could eventually lead to the Government divvying up energy supplies, and outages across the industrial sector.
Multiple cities including capital Berlin, Munich and Hanover have already brought in rationing measures such as turning off streetlights and controls on air conditioning in public buildings and hot showers at leisure centres.
Russia has drastically cut flows to Europe via the Nord Stream 1 pipeline since mid-June and is currently supplying only 20 per cent of agreed volumes, putting Germany under pressure to stockpile supplies.
Mueller concluded: “In all our scenarios, we will miss an average filling level of 95 per cent from November. We will barely be able to do that because individual storage systems have started from a very low level.”
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