A few hours before a meeting of energy ministers, the EU countries agreed on an emergency plan to save gas on Tuesday night. As confirmed by diplomats from the German Press Agency, the plan, as proposed by the EU Commission, envisages a voluntary reduction in national consumption by 15 percent between August 1, 2022 and March 31, 2023. This should allow the EU to get through the winter even with a complete gas supply stop from Russia.
The plan also provides for the possibility of triggering a Union alarm in the event of far-reaching supply bottlenecks and setting binding savings targets. Compared to the Commission’s first draft, however, there are significantly more exceptions and the hurdles for introducing the targets have been increased. The latter should only be able to be enforced by the Council of Member States and not by the EU Commission.
Qualified majority required
The decision-making process for the revised plan is expected to begin at a special meeting of energy ministers on Tuesday. This also requires a qualified majority, which according to diplomats should, however, be achieved without any problems. The deliberations of the permanent representatives of the member states have shown that the majority of the countries consider solidarity to be extremely important and want to save gas, it said. In addition to Hungary, only three other Member States had expressed major reservations.
Austria will be at the meeting of Climate Protection Minister Leonore Gewessler (Greens) represent. She pointed out on Monday evening in ORF’s “ZiB2” that gas consumption had already fallen by ten percent due to the high prices. At the same time, she reported that Austria was still “on course to achieve our storage goal” because the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, which was affected by Russian throttling, was not the central supply route for the country.
The Russian gas company Gazprom announced on Monday that it would further reduce deliveries through the Nord Stream 1 Baltic Sea pipeline. From July 27 (Wednesday) at 6:00 a.m. CEST, 20 percent or 33 million cubic meters of gas will flow through the most important supply pipeline to Germany every day. The reason for this was the repair of another turbine, the company said.
