Europe is preparing for not one but two cold winters
Lesson summary
Hi there everyone, I’m Jeff and this is Plain English, where JR and I help you upgrade your English with current events and trending topics. By listening right here, you’ll get exposure to lots of words and concepts in English. You’ll learn expressions and phrasal verbs. And if you join us at PlainEnglish.com, you’ll find lots of other ways to improve your skills in English—and a lot of it is free.
Coming up today: It’s getting cold in the northern hemisphere as winter approaches. And this is going to be a tough winter in Europe. That’s because a lot of the natural gas that heats homes and powers factories has typically come from Russia. But now, with the war and sanctions, Europe is scrambling to replace that gas. And it’s not easy.
In the second half of today’s lesson, I’ll show you how to use the phrasal verb “run on,” in the context of power and energy. And I have a quote of the week for you—actually I borrowed this quote from a Plain English Plus+ member. So let’s get into it.
Europe bracing for a cold winter
At the beginning of 2022, things were looking bleak for the price of energy worldwide. The price of oil was high and consumers were feeling it at the gas pump. But arguably a bigger shock was happening in the natural gas market. As governments lifted COVID-19 restrictions and as the economy rebounded, a lot more natural gas was needed all at once . Natural gas does three things: it powers factories, it heats homes and offices, and, importantly, it generates electricity. And all three of those things were in high demand as the world economy rebounded.
Prices were high, but they seemed manageable. But then Russia invaded Ukraine , Europe imposed sharp sanctions on Russia, and everything changed. That’s because Russia is the biggest supplier of natural gas to Europe.
Winter is peak season for natural gas usage. During the summer months, imported gas is stored; during winter, those stores are drawn down. When the invasion hit, in March, peak season was just ending and Europe avoided a shock crisis in the middle of winter.
But now, it’s getting cold again and the situation has gotten worse. Europe implemented a blanket ban on imports of Russian oil. But for all the sanctions it has imposed on Vladimir Putin and his government, Europe still relies on Russia for natural gas imports. Those imports have slowed down, but it hasn’t been easy.
Europe is scrambling to find out how to survive the upcoming winter. The continent is still importing gas from Russia, but at a much lower rate. But Europe needs to be prepared for Russia to cut off gas supplies entirely. There are four strategies for doing this; none of them is pleasant.
The first strategy is to import more liquefied natural gas. Oil is a convenient commodity because it can be shipped on a boat, on a train, on a truck, or through a pipeline. Natural gas is different. It typically arrives through pipelines, and those pipelines don’t go everywhere. So if Germany and Poland are cut off from Russian gas, they can’t easily turn around and buy it from somewhere else.
Unless, that is, they import liquefied natural gas. Gas can be liquefied where it is produced, then shipped by sea, and then converted back into gas at its destination. But it’s not easy to quickly build regasification stations. Many of Europe’s regasification stations are in the west—in Britain and Spain, for example. But that’s not where the Russian gas needs to be replaced.
So to get the imported gas to Poland and Germany, where it’s needed, the gas has to go through a pipeline across the Pyrenees Mountains. But guess what? There isn’t a lot of pipeline capacity to move all the gas east, to where it’s needed. Poland and Germany, therefore, are scrambling to build more regasification capacity themselves, but it won’t come online for years. In the meantime, they’re planning to use some portable regasification facilities, which are floating and can be installed in ports.
Liquefied natural gas imports will help, but they won’t fully replace the expected loss in Russian gas. Another option is to produce electricity using fuel other than natural gas. Here, again, the options are limited. Electricity can be generated with coal, which is dirty and accelerates climate change. Through gritted teeth, Germany and the Netherlands have allowed more electricity to be produced with coal.
Several European countries had plans to phase out their nuclear power stations. France is extending the life of a few nuclear power plants to boost its own electricity production. What about renewables? Europe’s plan in the medium term is to increase renewable energy and eventually phase out Russian gas imports. But that’s not yet possible. Last year saw lower-than-usual wind energy production and other renewable sources are not yet fulsome enough to make a big difference.
There are two more strategies to deal with the coming winter: demand reduction and rationing. The biggest reduction in demand will come from industrial users of natural gas. Germany’s big industrial firms are considering ways to reduce their usage of natural gas. Some factories can be retrofit to run on oil instead of natural gas. While oil is more polluting, it’s also more stable in the current economic environment. Another option is to simply reduce output.
Governments will be working with industry and households to promote voluntary measures to reduce demand. The Eiffel Tower will be dark at night, in a nod to conservation. Office landlords will lower the heat in their office blocks by a few degrees. Households will be encouraged to do the same. Expect demand for sweaters and blankets to increase.
Voluntary measures can only do so much. So that brings us to rationing—a word European politicians are reluctant to use. But the EU is proposing mandatory caps on energy consumption during certain peak hours over the winter. No politician wants to be the first to use the “R” word—rationing—until it’s absolutely necessary. But it’s already late October.
I’ll close with two pieces of good news and one bad piece of news. The good news is that Europe’s natural gas storage is up to about 80 percent of its capacity, which is higher than anyone thought possible back at the beginning of the war. And the other good thing is that the continent is now getting just nine percent of its gas from Russia, down from over half before the war. So a lot of the painful transition has already happened.
The bad news, though, is that every single factor driving up prices this year will also apply next year. New capacity to import liquefied natural gas takes a long time to build. Pipelines take even longer to develop: a huge mountain range crosses the middle of Europe; it’s not easy to build a pipeline across that. Energy analysts think that Europe is facing two years of gas shortages before the market stabilizes.
No good news on the horizon
I hate to add even more bad news, but just a few weeks ago the major pipeline connecting Russia to Europe started leaking. It’s under the water in the Baltic Sea. And it’s almost certain that this was sabotage of some kind, almost definitely from Russia. So this raises a frightening prospect. Imagine Russia stops selling all gas to Europe. That’s bad. But then imagine Russia decides to target the undersea pipelines that connect, say , Norway to mainland Europe. Russia has already proven that it can sabotage a pipeline and cause a major leak. There’s nothing stopping it from doing the same to the other pipelines that supply Europe in the same neighborhood.
This is just a case of extraordinarily bad timing. Europe’s hope, over the last decade, was that it could phase out coal and phase out nuclear power. Eventually, it could replace all that with green technologies—wind, solar, hydrogen. But that left a gap of a few decades. And Europe decided it could fill the gap with natural gas, and the cheapest place to get that gas was from Russia. It was never going to be a forever solution, they thought, but it would be a ten- or twenty-year solution until renewables really developed.
But right here in the gap, Russia invaded Ukraine and changed everything.
Great stories make learning English fun
