The best guess remains that Europe will, albeit with some pain, be able to conserve enough gas to avoid the lights going off this winter, but the approach of much colder weather has governments (wisely) announcing some contingency plans.
The New York Times (emphasis added):
The French government last week started instructing officials around the country to plan for potential rolling electricity outages as soon as next month. Britain’s National Grid operator has warned households of possible blackouts from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. if gas used to produce electricity runs short. Electric car owners in Finland are being advised not to heat their plugged-in vehicles on freezing mornings to avoid straining the grid.
Around 30 percent of the new cars sold in Finland are electric vehicles (EVs).
Not heating your EV is no great imposition, but even that minor request is a reminder of the value of diverse energy sources, something that is being thrown away in the rush to electrify.
And then there’s this (via Fox Business):
Switzerland could ban electric vehicles from being used non-essentially this winter as government officials begin to brace for an energy crisis during the winter months, according to reports.
But what about all those wind turbines?
Falling wind speeds in Europe are pushing power and gas prices higher, underscoring the heightened vulnerability of the continent’s energy system to weather conditions this winter . . .
[C]older weather in many places is kicking in at the same time wind speeds have fallen, bolstering demand for gas while reducing the ability of wind farms to generate electricity. This week, wind speeds in Hamburg fell to around 5 meters a second, or about 11 miles an hour, according to the weather forecasting site windy.com. That is the minimum speed required for electricity generation. Speeds of around 15 meters a second, or 33 mph, are needed to produce maximum power generation.
The sort of high-pressure systems dominating Europe at the moment tend to result in less wind, said Evangeline Cookson, meteorologist and research analyst at Marex Spectron. Such anomalies in wind speed aren’t particularly unusual. But this one is coming at a time when European governments are observing energy use as they navigate their first winter largely without Russian gas.
There may be a time (if scalable storage technologies are developed) that wind energy is ready for the role that it is currently being handed, but that time is not now. In the meantime, there is a certain irony in the fact that, in the name of protecting humanity from the effects of changes in the climate, Europeans (and, increasingly, Americans) are moving to energy sources that are vulnerable to shifts in the weather.