In Berlin one is hopeful or "in good spirits" that the winter will pass in a few weeks? I rather suspect that the Berlin politicians (Habeck and Co) do not notice at all what is going on there. Alright… Minister Habeck talked last week about the possibility of setting up a national gas reserve in Germany in the future, or even a regulation like Italy knows – namely that a certain level must be reached in the gas storage facilities by a certain date. But these are long term thoughts. However, the most important thing for consumers and the general security of supply is the here and now. And annoying they are, those consumers who whine about "slightly" increased energy prices? This is a great thing, because with exploding gas and electricity prices, the energy turnaround can be pushed even faster, away from oil, gas and coal and towards wind and solar energy? So the exploding gas price is a positive pain? The fact that there is a real danger of a shortage of supply seems somehow not to have arrived in Berlin yet.
Stocks for gas continue to empty rapidly
We have mentioned it several times in the last weeks. And also the latest data from "Gas Infrastructure Europe" with cut-off date 29. January show it: Gas storage facilities in Germany are emptying at breakneck speed. While exactly a week ago the level was 40.36 percent, by last Saturday (i.e. in just five days) the storage tanks had emptied to 37.13 percent. Since the 4. January sees significant declines in filling volumes throughout. Apparently, the liquefied natural gas delivered from overseas is not enough to compensate for the lack of gas supplies from Russia. Otherwise the storage facilities would not be emptying so quickly. In addition, a certain amount of working gas is needed, which must remain in the storage facilities to maintain a minimum pressure – so in reality there is even less gas available.
Outage in Norway lasts longer
On top of that, there are even problems in Norway at the moment. In the second most important supplier of gas to Germany after Russia, the company Equinor reports that a liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant near the city of Hammerfest, which has been out of operation since September 2020 due to a fire, and which was supposed to go back into operation at the end of March, will probably not be restarted until 17 March. May to be operational again – a full 6 weeks behind schedule. Hammerfest is Europe’s only large-scale LNG plant – it can normally process up to 18 million cubic meters of gas per day in regular operation. So from this plant, which liquefies gas extracted from the North Sea, no gas will be available for the European market for a long time yet. This, of course, further exacerbates the tense situation.
Gazprom tweets
As already several times in the last weeks, also today the Russian gas company Gazprom reports via Twitter with filling levels for gas for Europe, Germany and the Ukraine. The evil-doer who thinks evil of it (geopolitics). Gazprom points out that underground gas storage facilities in Europe would currently contain only 20 percent of the gas supplied in the summer. Also one refers to the filling level in Germany with 37 per cent and France with 36 per cent. As of last Saturday, European gas inventories were 2.7 billion cubic meters below historic lows (compared to the same time each year), according to Gazprom. Gazprom also mentions the reserves of gas in Ukraine, which are at record lows.
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What is all this fuss about?
If you don’t order gas, you don’t get gas. If you don’t order pizza, you don’t get pizza.
Even if it is repeated a hundred times that the levels in the gas storage facilities are low. They are low because no gas has been ordered.
The energy turnaround is being delivered exactly as it was ordered.
And those who think that it is already expensive today will be surprised what electricity will cost when more large power plants are shut down, and the electricity that will then be missing will have to be imported on a large scale at a horror price.
But, this is democracy.
It should be expensive to save, and it will be expensive. So expensive that people will prefer to have electricity for half the day at a tolerable price than for the whole day at a very high price.
One can be for or against. But it will z. Z. everything possible is done so that the train continues to run like this.
And Germany will suffer especially from very expensive electricity in Europe, because it has to import so much electricity, which was also planned.
So, no whining now.
Many greetings from Andalusia Helmut
Who does not order Helmut, gets nevertheless 10 times on the day Helmut and its always same drivel. It is delivered and delivered, although no one has ordered. Yawn!
Yes, Felix. Where Helmut is right, he is right !
Gazprom has Lt government promptly delivered so what is this drivel? Man (?) has ordered too little and what arrives in Brandenburg goes to Poland
Yes, Helmut who has said goodbye to Germany should rather be silent once. Because it is no longer on German ground….
Yes, Helmut delivers and what he delivers is reality. Who thinks it is not primarily about filling pockets here lacks the perspective. Priogas has done it before, cancelled its contract customers illegally and sold gas and electricity to highest bidder. The system is called capitalism and it goes over corpses if the profit is right. He is only very sensitive to social unrest.
If I were Putin, I would wait until the gas is gone.
Then at least all cheer me when I march in with gas cylinders.
@Columbo, but he was not bad either! &
Now everything possible in liquefied natural gas in the world is scraped together.
Even Australia has offered. Habeck would like to take "temporarily" then nevertheless rather liquid gas, than order gas in Russia.
I wonder if he knows that liquefaction to about 160 degrees minus consumes up to 25% of the natural gas that is being transported? In addition, there are the transport costs, plus greenhouse gases.
Guess who has to pay for it.
But this is typical green hypocritical politics.
Greetings from Andalusia Helmut
Who continues to follow such stupid types like Habeck should be asked whether the downfall of Germany wants or not.It is unbearable that uneducated, stupid green crybabies form this government. But one thing is for sure, Germany will become a laughing stock in the world. The world has never seen a more stupid and incompetent government than the present one.
Correction: Please "Habeck" against "A.Replace "tailor" and "government" with "commentators! Then it fits, the gibberish remains similar.
I do not know now, how much EU contracts alone in the last 10 years broken, ignored, falsified abolished and / or extended. It was even felt necessary to vaccinate an experimental vaccination by emergency approval.
I would like to spare myself further enumerations.
Only, not to use an already pressurized N2 in an emergency and rather go begging for gas in Azerbaijan, is the staircase joke, and a slap in the face of the people, who will have to pay this anti-citizen policy also by exploding energy prices. Not to mention how many jobs it will cost.
One can be in favor of this energy policy, and also in favor of the gas supplies from Russia being used as leverage against Russia.
And everyone will then certainly also have informed themselves about the consequences.
But then please do not always whine and complain when that occurs what was/is planned.
Nothing happened that was not planned.
Greetings from Andalusia Helmut
Hello Helmut, very aptly formulated and therefore certainly does not fit some here.
Hello Manfred,
yes, that is also the sense of such sides, we can (and should) also not be of one opinion.
You have to put up with stupid and insubstantial talk, these people are everywhere.
Many greetings from Andalusia Helmut
This is nonsense,
an opening of the N2 changes nothing!.
Russia will not deliver more than minimally possible to keep the contracts.
The last years have also worked without N2.
Nobody has claimed that the pipelines are overloaded!
The Russian does not send more than necessary, and the buyers do not want to buy more than necessary.
That’s what the Russian wants. Power play. Also works well that one can blame the EU. They would have missed everything and would block N2.
Ergo, mood mongering.
Hello Mr. Kummerfeld,
I have always been of the opinion that the procurement of gas and its delivery to customers is the responsibility of private energy suppliers in Germany. Now you imply that our Ministry of Economics is responsible for it. I was not aware of this before, and it puts the forced and senseless energy transition in a whole new, almost scandalous light. Do you have any further info on this monstrosity?
It is a fact that all orders have been delivered in full, this was also confirmed by the German government in response to a small question. Some of the cheaply purchased gas was even resold to Poland and Ukraine at high market prices. There were no new orders, neither from the government nor from corporations.
Hello Michael, the state does have influence, see Nord Stream 2, which is thwarted by politics. I do not want to evaluate this in a positive or negative way. But one has now also quite possibilities. Also, one could think about pushing private companies with financial subsidies to buy extra liquefied gas from overseas? Just a thought experiment.
@Claudio Kummerfeld, thank you very much for these ideas and suggestions.
If an overwhelming number of analyses by long-time market experts and insiders are to be believed, the problem is not low pipeline capacity, but lack of orders. It is simply delivered what was ordered. Two out of three existing Gazprom pipelines have been barely utilized for months, respectively. are even withdrawing gas from Germany to supply Poland, instead of fulfilling their supply obligations to Poland in the normal transit direction as before and virtually booking the outflows. Nordstream 2 would only increase the infrastructural capacities even more senselessly, but not the order quantities.
From these insider circles it is also heard that subsidies should be stopped completely and on the contrary a public subsidy register should be published. This would allow the potential for public anger as a regulatory tool to be focused specifically on those who benefit improperly from public tax dollars. At the same time, the free play of demand and supply could unfold undisturbed again, which would result in a rapid normalization of the supply situation with moderate prices at the same time.
Subsidies can therefore in no case be a solution approach.
Subsidies also raise another serious consequential problem that even more radical market liberal voices have been postulating for many years: The demand that subsidized individuals lose their right to vote. The employees of subsidized companies and, ultimately, the beneficiaries of subsidized goods and services also belong to this group. At least as long as they have a choice of energy sources to power their heating, hot water and stove, which applies to every property owner.
Every new insight, every solution strategy immediately raises new questions and problems. It is a highly complex topic, even if some people prefer the pure simplicity of analysis and solution approaches.
@leftutti, you have not yet understood the fine differentiated harp playing on hair-thin strings.
Where free real estate speculation rages among greedy investors at the best locations, tenant interests and social issues have no place. No brakes, no intervention. The state should rather build millions of cheap apartments for the displaced people there, where nobody would move voluntarily.
Where free energy speculators rage, almost giving away dirty electricity and senselessly making cheap green energy more expensive, all is well as long as the mix is price acceptable. The state should just keep its hands off it. If dirt suddenly becomes expensive, you’ll be crying out for government intervention, for brakes, caps, subsidies faster than electricity can flow from Hamburg to Munich. After helicopter money from the state to its downtrodden citizens, who are no longer able to cope with the excesses and extremes of free market economy.
Ordoliberalism or whatever it is supposed to be, when the state is supposed to compensate the crap of unrestrained speculators with ludicrous sums of billions whenever and more and more often, as soon as neoliberalism fails regularly and on all levels.
The whole topic is judged everywhere differently. By the way, this is called lying. What is probably true is that there are no orders from the purchasers. Which is probably also the case, memories were sold to Russia. That this will be exploited by Russia, given the political situation, is self-evident. However, the current government is not to blame for the nonsensical current situation. It is and remains an absurdity not to handle this under state direction is stupidity of neoliberal policy.
Probably we have enough gas, so why do we deliver Russian gas back to Poland and from there to Ukraine??
sorry my dear, that had to ask our highly embarrassing government, which machinations run there in the background
What you have to take into account: the gas we pump back to Poland……Is actually missing from our stores. Funny or? The evil Russian ……
Hello Mr. Kummerfeld,
thank you very much for this and your other information! It is really unbelievable what is going on here.
I am still surprised that the responsible persons in politics, the energy associations and the industry have not reacted at all to the development, which has started in the past year and increasingly since September at the power exchanges analogous to the gas exchanges leading up to it. Thus I can gain more and more from the factual comments from before.
If you want to promote the energy turnaround with high prices, then it is also part of it that you intentionally drive the German economy completely against the wall? Have the at all no idea of it, where our country and for Europe here zuzusteuern will be? People with low incomes will again have to bear the biggest burden of development here, although this is obviously indifferent to the responsible actors.
More and more often I think that when it comes to the topics of energy technology and the energy industry, many in politics and business simply don’t have a clue. Thus green ideologies, even if they are still so out of touch with reality and clearly do more harm than good to the climate, can prevail more and more easily.
And again this fear mongering.
10 weeks reserve. Uuuhhh, yes the further the year progresses, the less per week is needed. And gas is still supplied, the basic quantity.
Nordstream2 is not necessary, it has worked so far. It’s just a financial game for cheaper transportation.
Our own corporations are now enriching themselves on their own people.
Whoever orders Felx never knows what he will get, because apparently there are two completely different Felixes.
It’s unbelievable how the, sorry, ideologically completely screwed-up west jumps over every little stick the ukraine holds out to it.these again by a regular paranoia /russian phobia driven, which make economically meaningful decisions nearly impossible.the author is right: the word has not yet got around in berlin that you have to replenish resources on the basis of solid trade relations.by the way, i used to have, when it was totally in, "atimkraft-no,thanks" -sticker on the manta, the text, "kernkraftgegner uberwintern nights in the dark with cold butt".at that time no one had the idea to call me a nazi…today they do.how times change..
The problem is quite different. Europe depends on Germany for energy. Last December, when it was cold, France had to import the energy of at least 8 nuclear power plants from its neighbors to prevent a blackout. Spain, England, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland and even Italy have pumped electricity to France. Italy itself has too few power plants. Surplus German electricity is sent to Austria and Switzerland at night. Then the energy goes into the pumped storage and waits for the next morning to be converted back into electricity. It will go from Austria to Switzerland, they will add their pumped storage power and then the whole thing will go to Italy. So nothing comes back to Germany. Switzerland is also on the German drip. The Swiss have already noticed this and are worried about their own energy supply. The Swiss want to get away from nuclear but they can not. When a few years ago the energy feed from France to Italy had failed, this led to a blackout in the whole of Italy. The Swiss could not intercept this any more. There is a lot of wind in Germany at the moment. And what happens to the price of electricity on the stock market. On Sunday it moved way down again. It might have been the cheapest electricity in all of Europe. And with the French? Nothing happened. The electricity, mainly generated by nuclear power, remained very expensive. Europe is dependent on each other for electricity. It’s time to take stock of the European power plant fleet from the point of view of European security of supply. If Poland, the Czech Republic and Germany get out of coal-fired power generation, Europe will be dark. If France gets out of the nuclear energy, Europe is also dark. In the case of the French, the nuclear power plants are themselves going out of service because of an increasing number of defects. Let’s hope that necessity does not force the French to continue operating unsafe nuclear plants despite their shortcomings. That leaves the gas-fired power plants. They are currently driving up electricity prices because of high gas prices and are causing the alarmingly low level of German gas storage to decrease even faster. Every kWh produced with wind and solar energy reduces the CO2 emission. It doesn’t matter when and where it happens. But European doldrums cannot be explained away. For this we need other power plants. Even though they spend most of the year waiting to go into operation. Small tip: ElectricityMap on the Internet. This helps to understand. Look in more often. There is also an app.
In 2015, BASF and energy giant Gazprom revived a tricky deal. BASF trades its gas storage for shares in a natural gas field in Siberia. So Gazprom owns a large share of Germany’s gas storage facilities. You really don’t have to be a great strategist to put 1 and 1 together here.
The ones up there don’t care in which dimensions the energy prices will still rise. We (citizens) will once again be left alone to deal with politics and the private sector.
Ukraine conflict or not…… sad that no one can or will remember the NATO eastward expansion (unfortunately only by handshake).&
In a few weeks the cry will go out that fertilizers are scarce, therefore the harvests will be worse and the produced products will be more expensive.
Yes, we’ve all known that since 2021 at the latest.
Gypsum will also become scarce because it is a waste product of coal-fired power plants.
We have also known this for many years. No one seriously believes in the green hydrogen narrative.
These are such fantasies with which one wants to calm the people down.
And I could go on with this list for a long time.
The next 2 years will show us that what was planned so, will also occur so. One could reduce it with immediate measures still something, but otherwise we must thereby.
It will be hard.
Many greetings from Andalusia Helmut
Any news from Andalusia??
Or even something positive?
Downfall is so depressing in the long run.
I see a green door and I want it painted black
No colors anymore, I want them to turn black
Hello painter black.
Yes, we sit (17:45) on the terrace, at 16 degrees in the sun. There are so many sunny days that we haven’t had to use the cartridge heater to reheat the solar-powered hot water bolder (300 liters) in years.
We can heat all rooms with air conditioning, but in the evening and in the morning we heat the wood stove in the bathroom and in the living room.
But, we also need about 4.000 liters of water a week for the green areas.
Spain has enough natural gas terminals and for the mainland alone about 900 multi-water desalination plants and over 1.000 jam works.
Natural gas is sourced from Algeria by pipeline.
The madel blossom is in full swing. Diesel costs 1.42 euros, the 13 kg butane gas bottle 17.92 euros, and a kg of firewood (Madel or olive wood, about like oak delivered ready cut) 7 cents/kg.
And, quite great neighbors.
Many greetings from Andalusia Helmut
Hello Helmut, I actually meant positive things about Germany from the Andalusian perspective.
New, previously unknown assessments of other things that you haven’t been mantra-like chanting at least ten times a day for months now.
A kind of expansion of the horizon for many.
Is anything in Germany not complete crap? Except AfD of course.
You don’t have to constantly justify your life choices and fish for compliments.
You have done everything gaaaaanz great, 80 million Germans would like to follow you and Andalusia to Mallorca 2.0 make.
The climatic and geographic advantages of southern Spain at a certain time of the year are well known.
The subtropical roasting oven summers at 56 ° C in the shade also. Keyword "delivered as ordered.
Not much longer, and we morons in Germany can also enjoy the Mediterranean climate.
If Grand Tsar Vladimir Vladimirovich the New still tolerates something like pleasure in the neutral buffer zone.
So the political and military buffer and security zone westward up to the longitude of western Sweden, which Russia can just about accept.
Hello painter black,
I was asked if I could write something positive about Andalusia, and I answered. Then I was asked, what my wife says to it, and also there I answered. Now I answer you.
Who would like to hear something negative about Spain, I also have some.
Of course I think Spain is better than Germany by far, otherwise I wouldn’t be here. It is rather costly to leave one’s homeland in an orderly manner, and who likes to leave his homeland?. And I am not on the run, I can go back anytime.
I also think that from a distance you can better judge how a country is positioned in Europe. By this I mean infrastructure, education, research, economy, justice, future planning, etc.
But what my children and acquaintances tell me about how people have been dealing with each other in Germany for about 2 years, it must be the disaster.
For this reason alone, I will never return, not even to visit.