Across Europe, governments are scrambling to prevent energy rationing and blackouts this winter. Whether they succeed would depend in part on something they have no control over: The weather.
Analysts say that Russian President Vladimir Putin is hoping for a cold winter or a prolonged period of freezing temperatures after cutting Russian gas exports to Europe in retaliation for EU support for Ukraine.
Another cold season like 2010-2011 or a prolonged artic blast like the “Beast from the East,” which blew into western Europe from Siberia in 2018, could cause hardships that might weaken EU resolve in supporting Ukraine.
Photo: Reuters
“The energy weapon has one bullet in the chamber and he has just fired it,” said Eliot Cohen, a war historian and security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. “Europeans will go through the worst of it this winter.”
In many countries, households are being urged to turn down their thermostats and companies are being asked to find energy savings under EU plans to reduce gas consumption this winter by 15 percent compared with the average.
In the past few months, European states have raced to fill their strategic reserves, buying extra supplies at record prices from Algeria, Qatar, Norway and the US among other global gas suppliers.
EU stocks are now almost full — at about 90 percent capacity — providing a major safety cushion for consumers and businesses that rely on gas to heat their homes, offices and factories.
“Europe is well-placed to go through the winter under normal weather conditions,” Alireza Nahvi, a research associate at Wood Mackenzie, an energy consultancy, said in an e-mail.
With so much at stake, seasonal weather forecasts have become unusually important, with traders and policymakers eyeing reports from the EU-funded European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts in particular.
Their Copernicus Climate Change Service produces rolling three-month forecasts that assess the probability of different weather patterns over the continent, using a supercomputer that crunches data from national forecasters.
“The last few weeks have been really busy for us,” Carlo Buontempo, director of Copernicus Climate Change Service, told reporters ahead of the publication today of their next forecast for the November-January period. “This year, there is clearly a geopolitical interest in the question.”
Although it is still too early to make confident predictions about the winter, initial indications are that it will be warm overall, but with a risk of early cold snaps next month and in December.
“When you get into winter, the direction of the wind is what matters. If in mid-November to December, we have some of those strong easterly winds and snow dropping over Europe, this will certainly have an impact on gas demand, prices and geopolitics,” Buontempo said.
On the other hand, after a summer of record temperatures in Europe, the Atlantic Ocean is warmer than usual, serving as a heatsink, which should help keep temperatures higher when the winds are from the west, he said.
“I stand by the fact that it is probably going to be a warm winter overall, but there is a higher than even chance of having an outbreak of cold periods at the beginning,” he added.
The International Energy Agency (IEA), an energy consultancy financed by Western nations, has also been stress-testing Europe’s ability to withstand this winter without Russian gas.
At average temperatures and assuming a reduction in gas demand of about 9 percent this year compared with the average, it believes that the continent would make it through without major disruption.
“If we don’t have any Russian supplies and we have a winter that is colder than average by around 10 percent, that will put pressure on the European gas system,” said Gergely Molnar, an IEA gas analyst.
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