Can Europe survive looming gas shortages as Russia halts supplies?
- While the EU debates whether it can survive Russia halting gas supplies and at what cost, less has been said about preparing for shortages
- Higher prices will not be sufficient and rationing should be a last resort, so governments must come up with initiatives that draw popular support
Yet for all the intellectual energy that has been expended estimating the magnitude of potential GDP contractions, much less has been said about how to prepare for gas shortages if Russia takes it upon itself to close the taps. It is analogous to forecasting the extent of damage a hurricane will cause instead of actually preparing for the storm.
All of Europe’s gas providers – not just European Union producers but also neighbouring countries delivering gas by pipeline and exporters of global liquefied natural gas – are already operating at full capacity.
Gas delivered mostly by pipeline from Russia constitutes around 40 per cent of EU supply. Should this supply be interrupted, as it could well be, EU gas consumption would have to be reduced significantly.
In principle, three mechanisms can facilitate this reduced consumption: high prices, government programmes and mandatory rationing. In our view, the price mechanism alone will not be sufficient to manage shortages. Gas prices are already at record levels in Europe, and gas saving is far from sufficient.
In a recent policy brief for the German Institute for Economic Research, we call for an EU-level contingency plan to bring about gas savings. To head off looming populist challenges from the right, any such plan must command public support and be perceived as fair.
Without broad stakeholder participation and EU-level solidarity, advantaged groups will fare much better than others, aggravating existing inequalities and sharpening divisions within and between European societies.
Gas savings on a sufficient scale to offset the shortages would have to include significant contributions from all groups of users – residential consumers and services as well as industry.
This would require clear targets and fair burden-sharing among EU member states, across households, and between residential and industrial users. But, to be politically acceptable and ready for use, such targets must be negotiated pre-emptively.
Moreover, while there is still time, buildings with gas heating should be retrofitted with additional thermal insulation. This is a large-scale effort that will require an emergency investment plan. Additional savings can be realised from recalibrating heating systems, but some difficult behavioural responses will also be required.
For example, for every 1 degree Celsius reduction of room temperatures, Europeans can reduce their gas usage for heating by about 10 per cent. Further savings can be achieved by leaving unoccupied rooms unheated.
The process will be easier and more effective if EU governments decide jointly on gas saving targets, with each member state committing its fair share. Should shortages occur without a contingency plan in place, disorderly burden-sharing is likely to harm the most vulnerable disproportionately.
Given the wide range of stakeholders involved, negotiations over emergency plans should occur immediately. Gas saving targets and measures will inevitably be the backbone of any EU response to an interruption.
They will be more credible if they are agreed in parallel with contingency plans for rationing and additional solidarity measures. Economic policymaking must embrace the logic of disaster preparedness, paying special attention to issues of fairness, solidarity and legitimacy.
A shift in focus from economic forecasting to disaster preparation could prove critical to Europe’s ability to withstand the social, economic and political costs of an interruption in gas supplies. The task for policymakers is to develop more than price-based responses to scarcity, ensure that everyone contributes fairly and contain the damage as much as possible.
Karsten Neuhoff, a professor at the Technical University of Berlin, is head of the Climate Policy Department at the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin)