Europeans cannot say that they were not aware of the problem. In 2006, 2009 and 2014, Moscow had already occasionally interrupted its gas deliveries, amid disputes with the Ukrainian government. A “brutal realization”the Commission said in 2014. It was then preparing a strategy for energy security, which was clearly of no use.
The Twenty-Seven continued to import this Russian gas, so abundant and so cheap, which has long boosted the competitiveness of German industry. It took Russia to invade Ukraine on February 24, 2022, and subsequently cut off the taps to the Nord Stream and Yamal gas pipelines for things to change. Emmanuel Hache, economist at the Institute of International and Strategic Relations, denounces the ” bankruptcy ” of energy Europe.
The Europeans paid dearly for this lack of anticipation. Politically, first: if, for coal and oil, they themselves decided on an embargo on Russian deliveries, for gas, they deprived themselves of an instrument of sanction against Moscow. Economically, above all. Energy bills for households and businesses have suddenly soared to stratospheric levels. States urgently opened their wallets to help them get through this difficult moment, which affected their public finances.
From Paris to Berlin, via The Hague or Rome, governments were above all very afraid of having to ration their economies in the winter of 2022-2023. Especially since a good part of the French nuclear fleet was at a standstill, immobilized by corrosion problems on certain reactors. Berlin and Warsaw urgently decided to put coal mines back into service, but this was not enough.
Would citizens be able to heat themselves? Could the factories run smoothly? In the summer of 2022, Germany, which feared supply disruptions more than anything, collected everything it could find on the markets, causing prices to soar even further for its European partners.
In Brussels, the councils of energy ministers followed one another to try to avoid the worst. Finally, after nights of negotiations, the Twenty-Seven agreed on a response plan, which, two years later, bore fruit. Reduction in gas consumption, massive diversification of supplies, joint gas purchases, filling of storage reserves, lifting of regulatory constraints to facilitate the rise of renewable energies: no angle of attack has been ignored. What is the situation today ? Five major observations stand out.
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