In eastern France, twelve villages turn off their street lights at midnight. Barcelona offers home performance assessments. Warsaw subsidizes homes that replace fossil-burning stoves with heat pumps. With the war in Ukraine sending oil and gas prices skyrocketing and Russia’s President Vladimir V. Putin showing his willingness to use Russia’s energy resources as a weapon, towns and cities across Europe are finding different ways to reduce energy use. As the single largest European consumer of Russian gas, Germany may be the country most vulnerable to Russia’s energy pressure, but many other countries are also facing, at the very least, high prices and tight supplies. The severity or mildness of the coming winter will be a key factor. A mild winter in Europe would dampen global demand for natural gas, as would ongoing Covid-related lockdowns in China, the world’s largest natural gas consumer. Conversely, a harsh winter with low temperatures would increase demand and send prices even higher. But European nations are anxious to see how the weather plays out. Seeking to accelerate its energy independence from Russia, Italy has seen Algeria as a potential new gas supplier, increased renewable energy and burned more coal to keep homes lit and businesses lit. French President Emmanuel Macron, who has warned that the country should prepare for a complete cutoff of Russian gas, said that to deal with the gas shortage, the government would prepare a measured conservation plan to curb energy use . He also noted that France’s large nuclear power industry makes it less vulnerable than some of its European neighbors. “Russia uses energy, like food, as a weapon of war,” Mr Macron said earlier this month. Élisabeth Borne, the French prime minister, told lawmakers in early July that France would renationalize state-backed electricity giant Électricité de France, which generates most of the country’s electricity and operates all of its nuclear plants . In Belgium, the government reversed a decision to phase out nuclear power by 2025 and extended the life of two reactors for another decade. And the governments of Austria and the Netherlands have taken steps to switch to coal-fired power plants that had either closed or were scheduled to be phased out. These actions, however, have raised concerns that the European Union’s drive to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 will be derailed. Lawmakers in Poland backed measures that would allow them to increase gas storage capacity and loosen fuel trading rules, Reuters reported. Britain’s National Grid offered an assessment of its expected tight energy supply this winter, saying in a report that “while Britain is not dependent on Russian gas to the extent that the rest of Europe is, it is clear that disruption of gas flows to Europe could have negative effects, including very high prices.” The agency, which released an unusually early forecast to help the energy industry prepare for colder months, said it would deal with expensive and unpredictable power, along with any outages, by delaying the shutdown of coal plants. National Grid also encouraged greater participation in “demand-side response”, which appeared to refer to the potential need for individuals to limit or accept limits on electricity use. — Eduardo Medina, Erika Solomon and Melissa Eddy
