The European Commission presented on Wednesday 20 July its emergency plan to ensure the supply of gas in the Union for next winter. After having established a worst-case scenario in which all Russian gas supplies to the EU would be cut off, the Commission is proposing to the 27 Member States to reduce their gas consumption by 15% within eight months. For Nicolas Goldberg, energy expert at Colombus Consulting, these measures are “interesting“but already exist in French law and”are not applied“.
franceinfo: Do these proposals seem to you to be up to the urgency, the worst-case scenario imagined by the European Commission?
Nicholas Goldberg: The worst case scenario is to wake up: we are already there. There are already countries that no longer have access to Russian gas: this is the case of Poland, France, Bulgaria. You have to see that the gas is being cut gradually to gradually raise prices while reducing volumes. So you have to be prepared for the worst.
“This plan of the European Union is interesting, in particular on the measures of sobriety which it puts forward on the heating, the air conditioning and others”.
Nicolas Goldberg, energy expert at Colombus Consultingfranceinfo
You have to realize that the problem is that the Commission is not competent in this area, so these are still proposals. What worries me a little is that many of these measures are already in law in France: heating buildings at 19 degrees, air conditioning at 26 degrees and turning off the lighting of commercial signs at night. . Anyone who walks outside in the evening or enters a public building or a tertiary building sees that this is not applied. These measures are interesting, it is still necessary that they are generalized at European level, that will already be good, and that they are applied in the Member States which have already put them in their law as in France.
What other solutions do we have?
There are other energies that can be mobilized: the European Union is finally talking about postponing nuclear exits and shutdowns of nuclear units in Belgium and Germany. You have to realize that there are 3 nuclear reactors that have to be shut down in Germany this winter, so at the worst time. There are also fossil fuels that will be mobilized but we can clearly see that we lack solutions and that all resources will be welcome. We expect something else from the European Commission, it is this reading grid on essential and non-essential industries, those which could be cut or not. A European commissioner took the image of a candy factory that temporarily stops and saves gas, it would not be very serious. On the other hand, if more essential chemical or agri-food industries stop, it can be more annoying. We see that it would be good to prepare an organized load shedding plan if all the sobriety measures and if all the means of production put in motion are not enough.
What is the situation in France?
On gas, in France, we are not too bad. Our storage is more than 70% full, even though it’s not even August. When they are full, these storages allow us to cover around a quarter of our annual consumption.