BThere is still some time to go before a hard winter, but now we hear more and more about the danger of energy bottlenecks. Much depends on how much natural gas arrives from Russia – and the flow has been stagnant for a week. This puts large energy suppliers and smaller public utilities in trouble to supply their customers. The Federal Network Agency already fears an insufficient gas supply in winter. “As of today, we have a problem,” said its President Klaus Müller on Tuesday.
Even Klaus-Dieter Maubach, CEO of the Düsseldorf-based energy group Uniper, sees difficulties if the Russian state-owned company Gazprom provides less gas for a longer period of time or cuts supplies further. “We are now fulfilling the contracts that we have with our customers, but to what extent we can continue to do that, I don’t know,” he told Bloomberg news agency. “We have never experienced such a long disruption in gas flows from Russia on this scale.” Uniper, a subsidiary of the Finnish state-owned company Fortum, is the most important importer of Russian gas and has received less of it since June 15.
