Energy supply: What does the gas emergency plan provide for?

The gas emergency plan regulates the procedure in Germany if the supply situation threatens to deteriorate sharply – or if this is the case.

There are three levels. Private households, but also hospitals and care facilities, the fire brigade and the police are particularly protected in the third and highest level, the emergency. This means that their supply should also be secured through state intervention in the market.

The three levels are the early warning level, the alert level and the emergency level. Preparations have been made for the early warning level already announced by the federal government. In this phase, for example, the Federal Network Agency, as the responsible authority, worked out the criteria according to which it can distribute the gas that has become scarce in an emergency.

alert level

This is followed by the alert level that the Federal Ministry of Economics has now declared. According to the plan, in this case there is “a disruption in gas supply or an exceptionally high demand for gas, which leads to a significant deterioration in the gas supply situation – but the market is still able to cope with this disruption or demand”.

The current announcement was triggered by the fact that the Russian state-owned company Gazprom has significantly reduced deliveries via the Nord Stream Baltic Sea pipeline. Only about 40 percent of the maximum capacity flows through the pipeline.

emergency level

The emergency level follows the alert level: There is then an “extraordinarily high demand for gas, a significant disruption in the gas supply or another significant deterioration in the supply situation”. Market measures are then not sufficient to cover the gas demand.

The consequence of the emergency is that the state has to intervene – in particular to ensure the supply of “protected customers”: these are private households, but also hospitals, inpatient care facilities, facilities for the care and support of disabled people as well as fire brigades, police and the armed forces.

Measures in an emergency then include orders to switch off industrial customers or to end and large consumers to reduce consumption. There is no fixed shutdown order in relation to individual large consumers or sectors, but there are criteria that the Federal Network Agency uses as a basis. These are, for example, the urgency of the measure, the size of the company, the lead times for a shutdown or the expected economic and business damage.