BERLIN (Dispatches) – A German official has sounded the alarm, warning of serious electricity shortage in the country, and across the region.
“We have to assume that there will be big blackouts in winter,” President of the German Federal Office for Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance, Ralph Tiesler, said in an interview with the Berlin-based German newspaper Welt am Sonntag.
“We have to expect blackouts in the winter. By this I mean a regional and temporary interruption in the power supply,” Tiesler said, adding that the power cuts were due to both energy shortages and temporary shutdowns of the entire grid to protect the entire network.
The official further added that he was referring to short-term power outages, so-called brownouts, rather than large-scale blackouts.
Tiesler warned that the situation could potentially reach a critical point, urging Germans to stock up on food, water, and other essential supplies.
The last couple of years have been really tough for Germans, Tiesler said, adding that the COVID-19 pandemic served as a prime example of the unforeseen effects of a crisis.
The coming years are yet to be more challenging in light of the worsening climate situation and other serious and geopolitical tensions, Tiesler pointed out.
He said the saddest part of the news was that the European Union at the confederal level denies the hardships that normal people were going to face in winter.
In related news, a major German grid operator told media in early October that the country may be forced this year to cut its electricity exports to other countries in order to survive in winter.
Hendrik Neumann, chief technical officer of German electricity grid operator Amprion, told the Financial Times about potentially cutting off electricity exports to other countries to avoid local shortages.
Neumann said in the interview that temporarily pausing exports of electricity for hours, rather than days, could be a “last resort” to salvage the countries embattled energy crisis, which has been in the eye of the storm since gas supplies from Russia were cut.
France and Austria are the biggest importers of Germany’s surplus electric power, whose energy crises could deteriorate with any switch off of German exports.
Neumann said the Ukraine crisis was one of numerous “overlapping issues” contributing to Europe’s energy crisis, worsened by the shutdown of over half of France’s 56 nuclear power plants and low water levels on main rivers delaying coal shipping.
He claimed that while Amprion ignored “political and ideological aspects”, he didn’t agree with the comments from economics minister Robert Habeck, who said in July that Germany didn’t have an electricity problem.