Germany not planning strategic gas reserve, economy ministry says

FRANKFURT, June 17 (Reuters) - Germany is not planning to set up a national gas reserve as its recent legislation changing required filling levels for the coming winters will encourage the private sector to ensure supply security, an economy ministry spokesperson said on Tuesday.
Since the energy crisis following Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, European Union countries have turned to increased storage to protect against supply disruption.
Germany is mainland Europe's biggest gas consumer and last month German pipeline lobby group FNB proposed a new approach to gas storage, including a permanent national reserve.
"There are currently no considerations by the economy ministry pertaining to this (a strategy storage)," the spokesperson said in a written reply to an enquiry by Reuters, adding supply was secure overall.
Bloomberg reported on Tuesday that Germany was looking at whether to build up a strategic store of gas, citing unnamed sources.
Germany's new coalition government aligned domestic rules with anticipated changes to European Union regulations that require gas storage facilities to be 80% filled by November 1 to ensure enough supply for the winter, giving more flexibility than the EU's previous 90% capacity filling requirement, among a range of other measures.
German utilities operating gas storage facilities include Uniper (UN0k.DE), opens new tab, the SEFE group, VNG Gasspeicher and RWE (RWEG.DE), opens new tab.
The German economy ministry is mindful that any additional state moves could drive up the costs for consumers, the spokesperson said.
German gas stockpiles last stood at 45.8% vis-a-vis the EU's 53.8%, data from storage group GIE showed. The metric was well down from 76.8% a year ago.

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Learn with AIFact CheckingText to SpeechAI Summary

Related Articles

Reuters

2 hours ago

• Reuters

Europeans seek 'digital sovereignty' as US tech firms embrace Trump

BERLIN, June 21 (Reuters) - At a market stall in Berlin run by charity Topio, volunteers help people who want to purge their phones of the influence of U.S. tech firms. Since Donald Trump's inauguration, the queue for their services has grown. Interest in European-based digital services has jumped in recent months, data from digital market intelligence company Similarweb shows. More people are looking for e-mail, messaging and even search providers outside the United States. The first months of Trump's second presidency have shaken some Europeans' confidence in their long-time ally, after he signalled his country would step back from its role in Europe's security and then launched a trade war. "It's about the concentration of power in U.S. firms," said Topio's founder Michael Wirths, as his colleague installed on a customer's phone a version of the Android operating system without hooks into the Google ecosystem. Wirths said the type of people coming to the stall had changed: "Before, it was people who knew a lot about data privacy. Now it's people who are politically aware and feel exposed." Tesla (TSLA.O), opens new tab chief Elon Musk, who also owns social media company X, was a leading adviser to the U.S. president before the two fell out, while the bosses of Amazon (AMZN.O), opens new tab, Meta (META.O), opens new tab and Google-owner Alphabet (GOOGL.O), opens new tab took prominent spots at Trump's inauguration in January. Days before Trump took office, outgoing president Joe Biden had warned of an oligarchic "tech industrial complex" threatening democracy. Berlin-based search engine Ecosia says it has benefited from some customers' desire to avoid U.S. counterparts like Microsoft's (MSFT.O), opens new tab Bing or Google, which dominates web searches and is also the world's biggest email provider. "The worse it gets, the better it is for us," founder Christian Kroll said of Ecosia, whose sales pitch is that it spends its profits on environmental projects. Similarweb data shows the number of queries directed to Ecosia, opens new tab from the European Union has risen 27% year-on-year and the company says it has 1% of the German search engine market. But its 122 million visits from the 27 EU countries in February were dwarfed by 10.3 billion visits to Google, whose parent Alphabet made revenues of about $100 billion from Europe, the Middle East and Africa in 2024 - nearly a third of its $350 billion global turnover. Non-profit Ecosia earned 3.2 million euros ($3.65 million) in April, of which 770,000 euros was spent on planting 1.1 million trees. Google declined to comment for this story. Reuters could not determine whether major U.S. tech companies have lost any market share to local rivals in Europe. The search for alternative providers accompanies a debate in Europe about "digital sovereignty" - the idea that reliance on companies from an increasingly isolationist United States is a threat to Europe's economy and security. "Ordinary people, the kind of people who would never have thought it was important they were using an American service are saying, 'hang on!'," said UK-based internet regulation expert Maria Farrell. "My hairdresser was asking me what she should switch to." Use in Europe of Swiss-based ProtonMail rose 11.7% year-on-year to March compared to a year ago, according to Similarweb, while use of Alphabet's Gmail, which has some 70% of the global email market, slipped 1.9%. ProtonMail, which offers both free and paid-for services, said it had seen an increase in users from Europe since Trump's re-election, though it declined to give a number. "My household is definitely disengaging," said British software engineer Ken Tindell, citing weak U.S. data privacy protections as one factor. Trump's vice president JD Vance shocked European leaders in February by accusing them - at a conference usually known for displays of transatlantic unity - of censoring free speech and failing to control immigration. In May, Secretary of State Marco Rubio threatened visa bans for people who "censor" speech by Americans, including on social media, and suggested the policy could target foreign officials regulating U.S. tech companies. U.S. social media companies like Facebook and Instagram parent Meta have said the European Union's Digital Services Act amounts to censorship of their platforms. EU officials say the Act will make the online environment safer by compelling tech giants to tackle illegal content, including hate speech and child sexual abuse material. Greg Nojeim, director of the Security and Surveillance Project at the Center for Democracy & Technology, said Europeans' concerns about the U.S. government accessing their data, whether stored on devices or in the cloud, were justified. Not only does U.S. law permit the government to search devices of anyone entering the country, it can compel disclosure of data that Europeans outside the U.S. store or transmit through U.S. communications service providers, Nojeim said. Germany's new government is itself making efforts to reduce exposure to U.S. tech, committing in its coalition agreement to make more use of open-source data formats and locally-based cloud infrastructure. Regional governments have gone further - in conservative-run Schleswig-Holstein, on the Danish border, all IT used by the public administration must run on open-source software. Berlin has also paid for Ukraine to access a satellite-internet network operated by France's Eutelsat ( opens new tab instead of Musk's Starlink. But with modern life driven by technology, "completely divorcing U.S. tech in a very fundamental way is, I would say, possibly not possible," said Bill Budington of U.S. digital rights nonprofit the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Everything from push notifications to the content delivery networks powering many websites and how internet traffic is routed relies largely on U.S. companies and infrastructure, Budington noted. Both Ecosia and French-based search engine Qwant depend in part on search results provided by Google and Microsoft's Bing, while Ecosia runs on cloud platforms, some hosted by the very same tech giants it promises an escape from. Nevertheless, a group on messaging board Reddit called BuyFromEU has 211,000 members. "Just cancelled my Dropbox and will switch to Proton Drive," read one post. Mastodon, a decentralised social media service developed by German programmer Eugen Rochko, enjoyed a rush of new users two years ago when Musk bought Twitter, later renamed X. But it remains a niche service. Signal, a messaging app run by a U.S. nonprofit foundation, has also seen a surge in installations from Europe. Similarweb's data showed a 7% month-on-month increase in Signal usage in March, while use of Meta's WhatsApp was static. Meta declined to comment for this story. Signal did not respond to an e-mailed request for comment. But this kind of conscious self-organising is unlikely on its own to make a dent in Silicon Valley's European dominance, digital rights activist Robin Berjon told Reuters. "The market is too captured," he said. "Regulation is needed as well."

The Independent

3 hours ago

• The Independent

Iran and Israel continue attacks as diplomatic talks fail

Iran and Israel traded daytime missile attacks on Friday, concluding a week of relentless bombing and escalating tensions. Iran 's foreign minister stated his country would not negotiate with the US as long as Israel continued airstrikes, maintaining Iran 's nuclear program is peaceful. Iranian ballistic missiles struck a building near Haifa, injuring at least 17 people, prompting a warning of revenge from Iran 's religious ruler, Ali Khamenei. Israel reported conducting multiple airstrikes on Iran, targeting industrial sites for missile manufacturing and a research agency linked to potential nuclear device development. Diplomatic talks in Geneva involving Iran, the EU, and the UK showed no breakthrough, with the UK urging Iran to engage in diplomacy with the US within a two-week window.

Spectator

6 hours ago

• Spectator

Is Dutch tolerance dying?

Campaigners across southern Europe are protesting against 'touristification'. Meanwhile, in the Netherlands, wealthy expats are in the firing line. Businesses in Amsterdam could be asked to foot the bill for local housing if they employ highly-skilled internationals. Alongside paranoia about asylum seekers, there is a rising feeling that expats and even holidaymakers are unwelcome in parts of the continent. The Netherlands was once an outward-looking, tolerant, trader nation. Is that still the case? It's not much fun to live in a place – or even visit somewhere – that resents your presence, especially if you have bothered to learn the local language and swallowed the high tax rates that fund northern Europe's generous social benefits. But this 'me-first' sentiment in Europe is great news for London and anywhere else in the market for scarce global talent. Post-Brexit 'trading volumes shifting to Amsterdam appear to be here to stay,' Dutch financial paper Het Financieele Dagblad jubilantly announced earlier this year. The paper claimed that 'Amsterdam is now bigger than London'. In the aftermath of Britain's departure from the EU, there certainly appeared to be some evidence that London's dominance as a global financial centre might be at risk. But – unlike the years after the 2016 EU referendum, in which the European Medicines Agency relocated to Amsterdam, and the Netherlands Foreign Investment Agency loudly boasted about winning businesses, jobs and investments – there has been a change of tone. The Netherlands was once an outward-looking, tolerant, trader nation that advertised for foreign students and was proud of its English-language proficiency. Is that still the case? Last week, Amsterdam council voted to pass a motion to ask international businesses based in the Dutch capital to contribute to solving a general housing shortage and pay for programmes to get their 'lonely' foreign workers to integrate. The policy, 'Make Amsterdam your home', sounded friendly enough, but the message behind it was anything but. 'In short, internationalisation is part of our city but it also brings challenges, such as driving up house prices, the emergence of a parallel world and the transformation of neighbourhoods, for example because more and more English is spoken,' it declared. Foreign companies, said the accompanying Labour press release, should be expected to give something back. As the Netherlands remembers 80 years of liberation from the Nazis – thanks to Allied troops, speaking that awful language of English – foreigners are being blamed for driving up house prices and sabotaging social cohesion. The facts are less important than nationalist gut feeling: the Dutch government offers 110,000 highly-skilled migrants (including footballers) a temporary tax break to compensate for its high income taxes. But despite the expats, who don't even have a vote, benefitting our country, they are far from popular. It doesn't seem to matter that a government analysis found the tax break raises €128.5million (£110 million) a year, has a 'very modest impact' on house prices and 97 per cent of the highly-skilled professionals work full time, compared with 52 per cent of the Dutch. Nor that Statistics Netherlands research suggests that Germans and Brits lead the least segregated lives and wealthy locals the most. The Dutch government recently collapsed in a row over asylum created by far-right veteran Geert Wilders. Universities are scrapping English-language courses and capping international student numbers. Now, Amsterdam councillors are pointing the finger at internationals for the consequences of the Netherlands' part-time lifestyle, lack of house-building and preference for single-person households. Meanwhile, the country continues to ignore calls from the European Commission, Dutch central bank and its own economists to reduce home owner tax breaks that inflate its housing market. It's easy – if absurd – to vilify other people and treat hard-working foreigners who do the jobs you can't or won't do as 'exploiting' your system. But the result is obvious: when places like the Netherlands become hostile to international business and talent, it will go elsewhere. The failure of Dutch tolerance is a marvellous opportunity, in other words, for a place like London – where you can be judged by what you can do instead of by your name; where a finance minister doesn't have to admit the tax office has a problem with 'institutional racism'; and a government doesn't fall after falsely accusing some 40,000 families of childcare benefits fraud. Non-doms might not be welcome in the UK – and Wise, the British fintech, might be leaving for New York – but filthy-rich talent is not a problem in London. Some Dutch experts, at least, recognise that their golden age is tarnishing. To the concern of the Confederation of Netherlands Industry and Employers (VNO-NCW), the country dropped from 4th in 2021 to 10th this year in the IMD's world competitiveness ranking. The Netherlands might be ahead of the UK (29th) with the help of its international trade, but tax policy is rated a dismal 67th – well under Britain. The general-director of the VNO-NCW Focco Vijselaar tells The Spectator that there is cause for concern. 'For quite some time, we have been pointing out the concrete rot in our business climate,' he said. 'And you see the cracks in these kinds of lists. If you look at international investment, we are at 41st place, an unprecedentedly low spot. We are struggling with major bottlenecks in the Netherlands: a housing market that is locked down, nitrogen pollution problems and high energy prices.' Flip-flopping on highly-skilled migrant tax breaks does not help, he added: 'We need the expats.' Liberal democrats in Amsterdam are also worried about scapegoating the international community. 'That social cohesion is under pressure is not solely due to the expats,' said Democrats 66 economics spokesman Erik Schmit last week. 'Housing prices are rising: it is not proven that this is solely due to the international community…As a government, we have other priorities.' But after constant changes to the 30 per cent highly skilled migrant tax-free allowance and the removal of its non-dom ruling, the Netherlands is increasingly out of favour. New foreign student numbers have plunged, threatening various courses. Data from jobs site Indeed shows a drop of 48 per cent in applications from India and 40 per cent from the UK this year. Emigration appears to have peaked and highly-skilled migrant numbers are tumbling. Britain might have creaking infrastructure and complex regulation, but it is remarkably open and far less corrupt than many of its neighbours. If the Dutch want to drive out innovators, talent and factories with high energy prices, punitive taxes and cultural suspicion – and if southern Europe is busy fighting with tourists – other cities have a chance. Now is the time to declare Britain open for business.