My DW TV: Why Putin cuts EU gas bit-by-bit? Can Germany handle it? Wind’s low, so we’re buring gas! | Many EU states warned Berlin: “Don’t open our door to Putin’s Trojan horse!”

The title tells most of it. I explain why I think Putin is playing with gas, not oil and the EU and German vulnerabilities.

Now, German storage will not be able to be filled to the ministry’s target level of 95% by November, according to the Federal Transmission System chief, Mr. Klaus Muller – in fact, even if NS1 were still flowing at 40%.

Not only that, although Energy Minister Habeck has agreed to bring back online all the coal power plants possible, in fact Germany has a poorly thought-out over dependence on wind and it simply is not blowing much this summer. So, in actuality, we are burning more gas now to produce electricity than last year – a complete waste of gas. Also, the Rhine is low and coal barges are having difficulty delivering coal to power plants.

I pointed out that Germany was warned by many EU states. Berlin “opened the fortress gate and let the Trojan Horse in” … and now we are all having to deal with the Russian energy war, part of its economic war in support of its aggressive war in Ukraine.

Unlike Germany, Members such as Spain, Portugal, Poland and Lithuania that built, some years ago, LNG import terminals to insure their – and the entire EU’s – energy security against dependence on Putin’s regime for natural gas, German diplomats, officials and “climate activists” fiercely opposed these policies. German elites instead insisted on an unrealistic “100% renewables” plan, backed up by Russian natural gas as there simply is not, in reality, any generalizable, universal grid scale storage technology. In fact, 94% of all “grid storage” for weather-dependent renewables, worldwide, is pumped hydro (Ref. NREL).

Hence, Russian gas was Germany’s de facto backup, its de facto “grid scale storage” producing a twin overdependencey: On weather-dependent, grid-complicating wind and solar, and “cheap” Russian natural gas..

Result: now we are all susceptible to Putin’s energy weaponization as war rages in Ukraine.

Critiques, information, clarifications are most welcomed, as always. Dr. Tom O’Donnell