FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) — As Europe heads into winter plagued by an energy crisis, offices become colder. Statues and historic buildings darken. Bakers who cannot afford to heat their ovens talk about giving up, while fruit and vegetable growers risk leaving greenhouses idle.
In poorer Eastern Europe, people stock up on firewood, while in wealthier Germany the wait for an energy-efficient heat pump can take six months. And companies don’t know how much more they can cut.
“We can’t turn off the lights and force our guests to sit in the dark,” said Richard Kovacs, business development director for Hungarian burger chain Zing Burger. Restaurants are already running grills only when necessary and using motion sensors to turn off lights in warehouses, with some stores facing a 750% increase in their electricity bills since the start of the year.
With high costs and tight energy supplies, Europe is rolling out relief programs and planning to shake up electricity and natural gas markets as it prepares for increased energy consumption this winter. The question is whether this will be enough to avoid government-imposed rationing and blackouts after Russia cut natural gas needed to heat homes, run factories and generate electricity at a tenth of what it was before invading Ukraine.
Europe’s reliance on Russian energy turned the war into an energy and economic crisiswith prices hitting record highs in recent months and fluctuating wildly.
In response, governments have worked hard to find new supplies and save energy, with gas storage facilities now 86% full ahead of the winter heating season, exceeding the target of 80% by November. They have pledged to reduce gas consumption by 15%, which means the Eiffel Tower will plunge into darkness more than an hour earlier than normal as stores and buildings turn off lights at night or lower thermostats.
Europe’s ability to weather the winter may ultimately depend on how cold it gets and what happens in China. Shutdowns aimed at halting the spread of COVID-19 have slowed large parts of China’s economy and meant less competition for scarce energy supplies.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said this month that early preparations It means Europe’s biggest economy is “now in a position where we can bravely and bravely step into this winter, in which our country will weather this”.
“Nobody could have said that three, four, five months ago, or at the beginning of this year,” he added.
Even if there is gas this winter, high prices are already pushing individuals and businesses to consume less and forcing some energy-intensive factories such as glassmakers to close.
It’s a decision also facing growers of fruit and vegetables in the Netherlands, which are essential to Europe’s winter food supply: close greenhouses or suffer a loss after costs soar. for gas heating and electric lighting.
Bosch Growers, which grows green peppers and blackberries, implemented additional insulation, idled a greenhouse and experimented with lower temperatures. The cost? Lower yields, blackberries that take longer to ripen and potentially run into the red to maintain customer relationships even at lower volumes.
“We want to stay in the market, not to ruin the reputation we have developed over the years,” said Wouter van den Bosch, the sixth generation of his family to help run the business. “We are in survival mode.”
Kovacs, producer van den Bosch and bakers like Andreas Schmitt in Frankfurt, Germany, face the stark reality that conservation doesn’t go that far.
Schmitt is heating fewer ovens at its 25 Ernst Cafe bakeries, running them longer to save start-up energy, reducing its selection of pastries to ensure ovens are working at full capacity, and stocking less dough to reduce production costs. refrigeration. This could save 5 to 10% on an energy bill which should go from 300,000 euros per year to 1.1 million next year.
“It won’t change the world,” he said. Most of its cost is “the energy needed to get bread dough, and that’s a given amount of energy”.
Schmitt, head of the local bakers’ guild, said some small bakeries were considering giving up. Government help will be essential in the short term, he said, while a longer-term solution is to reform the energy markets themselves.
Europe aims for both, although the necessary expense may be unsustainable. Nations have allocated 500 billion euros to alleviate high utility bills since September 2021, according to analysis by the Bruegel think tank in Brussels, and they are bailing out utilities that cannot afford to buy gas to fulfill their contracts.
Governments have secured additional gas supplies from pipelines to Norway and Azerbaijan and stepped up purchases of expensive liquefied natural gas that arrives by ship, largely from the United States.
At the same time, the EU is considering drastic interventions such as taxing the windfall profits of energy companies and reorganizing electricity markets so that natural gas costs play less of a role in determining electricity prices.
But as countries scramble to replace Russia’s fossil fuels and even reactivate polluting coal-fired power plants, environmentalists and the EU itself say renewables are the long-term solution..
Neighbors in Madrid seeking to cut their electricity costs and promote the energy transition this month installed solar panels to power their housing estate after years of work.
“I suddenly reduced my gas consumption by 40%, with very little use of three radiators strategically placed in the house,” said neighbor Manuel Ruiz.
Governments have dismissed Russia as an energy supplier, but President Vladimir Putin still has influence, analysts say. Some Russian gas is still flowing and a harsh winter could undermine public support for Ukraine in some countries. There have already been protests in places like Czechia and Belgium.
“The market is very tight and every molecule counts,” said Agata Loskot-Strachota, senior energy policy researcher at the Center for Oriental Studies in Warsaw. “That’s the leverage that Putin still has – that Europe should deal with disappointed or impoverished societies.”
In Bulgaria, the poorest of the 27 EU members, soaring energy prices are forcing families to cut extra spending ahead of winter to ensure they have enough money to buy food and medications.
More than a quarter of Bulgaria’s 7 million people cannot afford to heat their homes, according to EU statistics office Eurostat, the highest in the bloc of 27 countries due to poorly constructed buildings. isolated and low income. Nearly half of households use firewood in the winter as the cheapest and most accessible fuel, but rising demand and runaway inflation have pushed prices above last year’s levels.
In the capital, Sofia, where almost half a million households are heated by central installations, many looked for other options after the announcement of a 40% price increase.
Grigor Iliev, a 68-year-old retired accountant, and his wife decided to cancel their central heating and buy a combined air conditioner-heater for their two-room apartment.
“It’s an expensive device, but in the long run we’ll recoup our investment,” he said.
Meanwhile, companies are trying to stay afloat without alienating customers. Klara Aurell, owner of two restaurants in Prague, said she had done everything she could to save energy.
“We use LED bulbs, we turn off the lights during the day, the heater only works when it’s really cold and we only use it in a limited way,” she said. “We are also taking measures to save water and use energy-efficient equipment. We can hardly do anything else. All that remains is to raise prices. It’s like that.”
The gourmet bakery Babushka Artisanal Bakery, located in an affluent district of Budapest, had to increase its prices by 10%. The bakery has been using less air conditioning despite the hottest summer ever in Hungary and is making sure the ovens aren’t running without bread in them.
Although it has enough traffic to stay open for now, further increases in energy costs could threaten its viability, owner Eszter Roboz said.
“A double increase in energy costs is always part of how our business operates and part of our calculations,” she said. “But in the case of a three- to four-fold increase, we’ll really have to think about whether we can continue that.”
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Spike reported from Budapest, Hungary; Janicek from Prague; and Toshkov from Sofia, Bulgaria. Videojournalist Irene Yagüe contributed from Madrid.