(Finance) – The Minister of Energy Transition, Roberto Cingolanistated that if Russia decides to stop gas supplies “we will have a winter difficult and frankly no one wants to take restrictive measures “.” One thing is to say we lower the temperature of the heating by one degree, or to say for a few months we go on with the power plants to coalbecause in the meantime we save gas temporarily, it is one thing to say we must stop activities. We try not to do this, but I must say that we are in a pretty good position at the moment “, he explained yesterday during the Progress broadcast on Sky TG24.
“The main objective is to guarantee the supplies of gas for the winter, when there is the peak of consumption industrial and domestic. With the war, in Italy we had a decrease in flows of 15% “and the Russia now it has announced that “Nord Stream will be closed for two weeks for maintenance: this will mean that there will be even less gas and prices will increase because the gas market is speculative and there will be a further hoarding race,” explained Cingolani. “To deal with this situation – continued the minister – we first of all provided for in the legislative decree bills measures to increase storage. Today we are around 60% and we must reach 90%. For this we have provided financial allocations to allow the operators and al manager to find gas on the market and secure these supplies for supplying the country “.
In fact, the minister is concerned about the works of maintenance scheduled for Nord Stream, the gas pipeline that connects Russia to Germany and therefore to the rest of Europe. Work should start as scheduledJuly 11 and could result in a complete disruption of gas supplies from Russia for two weeks in some European countries, as well as a substantial reduction in others.
The fear is that this supply disruption will not be temporary and that the Russia can take advantage of the situation to conduct what the Minister of Economy of Germany, Robert Habeck, he called an “economic war” against Europe. “These decisions are not random but they are an economic war, perfectly rational and very evident”, explained the German minister. “After a 60 percent outage [delle forniture di gas] the next step is logical, “he added.