With winter fast approaching, Europe scrambles to prepare for energy shortages

 

Patrick Vranckx, a bakery owner in Temploux, Belgium — 50 miles southeast of Brussels — is panicked. His Boulangerie Pâtisserie Vranckx, which sells hand-molded bread and pastries to about 400 customers every day, is already struggling to keep up with skyrocketing energy costs, and winter promises even greater pain. “We won't be able to hold out many more months,” he told Yahoo News, noting that electricity prices have quadrupled over the past year. 

With delivery of Russian natural gas, which last year provided 40% of Europe’s supplies, now down to a trickle, OPEC cutting oil production, hydropower crippled by this summer’s drought, renewable electricity not fully in force, and temperatures already falling as winter approaches, Europe is bracing for the worst energy crisis the continent has ever known. Government officials and energy agencies are warning of possible blackouts as the cold sets in. Energy may even be rationed as part of “robust demand-reduction measures,” 

Thorfinn Stainforth, an analyst at the Institute for European Environmental Policy, told Yahoo News, adding that industrial customers are likely to be hit first. Boulangerie Pâtisserie Vranckx, a brick building lit from inside, flanked by two trees on cobblestones. Boulangerie Pâtisserie Vranckx in Temploux, Belgium, is already feeling the energy pinch. (via Facebook) Johan Lilliestam, who leads the Energy Transitions group at Germany’s Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies in Potsdam, Germany, has dubbed the dire situation “Europe’s Energy Drama,” and says that each day seems to deliver a new cliffhanger. 

Two weeks ago, it was the suspected sabotage of the underwater Nord Stream pipelines, which closed them down for good and set off European panic about the security of other gas pipelines amid an energy standoff with Russia. 

Last Thursday, just as the 27-member European Union was finalizing its sanctions on Russian oil, OPEC+ announced it had reached a deal with Moscow to slash petroleum production, a move that some believe could accelerate inflation. 

“I don’t think the announcement will strongly affect supply, but it may affect prices,” Lilliestam told Yahoo News, while noting that the deal came “despite strong calls from the West not to take measures that could further increase oil prices.” 

In France, normally an electricity exporter to its Western Europe neighbors, thanks in part to its investments in nuclear power, the state electricity agency is warning of possible cutoffs. Half of the country’s 56-reactor nuclear fleet is down, due to corrosion and maintenance, Phuc-Vinh Nguyen, research fellow at the Jacques Delors Energy Center, told Yahoo News. 

The reduced production of electricity is particularly worrisome, he said, since the French rely on electricity for heating. What’s more, wage strikes by oil workers have severely reduced French gasoline supplies, as witnessed this weekend by long lines at stations, a third of whose pumps are running dry.