Companies could be compensated for not using gas

What do you do when you run out of gas? Russia continues to reduce its deliveries and justifies this with technical difficulties for which the West is responsible. The German company Uniper announced on Friday that it was getting 60 percent less gas from Russia than it had ordered. France, which is hardly dependent on the raw material from Russia, is now getting nothing, in Italy, which is in a similar situation to Germany, according to the ENI group, half of the Russian gas was missing on Friday. There was therefore speculation in government circles as to whether gas would have to be rationed for some companies.

In Europe, Moscow’s justification is considered to be a pretense. This also applies to the offer to use the finished but never used Nord Stream 2 line as an alternative to the Nord Stream 1 Baltic Sea pipeline. The “Zukunft Gas” association points out that the pipeline through Ukraine is far from being fully utilized. “The Russian side would have the opportunity to compensate for the missing quantities in other ways. We don’t have an answer to the question of why this isn’t happening,” says association leader Timm Kehler.

Has the storage success upset Russia?

Recently, Germany was not doing so badly on the supply side. The stores could be filled up surprisingly quickly, which was due to targeted auctions, but also to government intervention. The Gazprom storage facility in Rehden, Lower Saxony, the largest in Germany, is being filled with funds from the KfW development bank by the so-called market area manager Trading Hub Europe (THE). Previously it was practically empty, now it is 9.5 percent full.

Perhaps the success in storage is a reason for Russia’s more aggressive appearance on the market, says the Cologne economist Axel Ockenfels. More can be done on the supply side, he thinks, like producing more gas in the Netherlands or using more coal and nuclear power to generate electricity on a transitional basis; in fact, the new replacement power plant availability law wants to activate coal reserves instead of gas power generation. But the key lies on the demand side, i.e. consumption, according to Ockenfels: “That’s the only thing in the gas conflict that we have completely under our own control.”

Economics Minister Robert Habeck (Greens) and the Federal Network Agency have repeatedly called for savings. Recently there has been a dedicated advertising campaign, Habeck is thinking about statutory energy saving regulations. But Ockenfels says: “The federal government’s recent campaign to save gas is not enough.” Targeted incentives, such as bonus payments to households if they achieve savings targets, would be better. There should be auctions for companies that could reward their willingness to forego gas in the event of a crisis.

The idea of ​​offering financial compensation to large industrial consumers if they do not use their gas in the short term in times of shortage is just beginning to take shape. This instrument already exists in the electricity market to compensate for fluctuations in the grid. As can be heard, the Federal Network Agency is also preparing a corresponding initiative for gas, but has not confirmed it.

This is how compensation works for waiving companies

As with electricity, the procedure runs under the keyword “balancing energy” and describes a type of reserve to compensate for deviations between supply and demand in the short term. If there is a shortage of gas, participating companies could voluntarily refrain from supplying them in return for a corresponding payment. To do this, the network agency would have to commission the market area managers THE with the development of corresponding product offers for the economy.