[Extreme heat has provided some relief from Europe’s punishing
energy crunch. Trouble looms, though, as it continues to seek
alternative energy sources.]
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RECORD-HIGH TEMPERATURES ACROSS EUROPE EASE ENERGY CRISIS IMPOSED BY
RUSSIA’S WAR  
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Chelsea Harvey and Sara Schonhardt
January 5, 2023
E&E News
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_ Extreme heat has provided some relief from Europe’s punishing
energy crunch. Trouble looms, though, as it continues to seek
alternative energy sources. _

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Europeans have feared for months about freezing this winter because of
an energy crisis stemming from Russia’s war in Ukraine. They were
not expecting a heat wave.

On the first day of the year, weather stations across Europe saw their
highest January temperatures of all time.

Nearly a thousand records fell in Germany alone in the first few days
of the year, according to climatologist Maximiliano Herrera, who
tracks extreme temperatures around the world. Thousands fell elsewhere
across the continent.

The expanse and intensity of the warm spell make it “probably one of
the most intense ever seen,” Herrera said in a message to E&E News.

At least 15 countries across Europe saw record-breaking temperatures
in the past week. The hardest hit areas stretched from France to
Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Records also fell in
Luxembourg, Poland and Belarus.

The temperature anomalies were “unprecedented,” Herrera said, with
some weather stations hitting temperatures that were higher than July
averages. Warsaw, Poland, which boasts a climatological record dating
back 200 years, broke its January temperature record by more than 5
degrees Celsius.

A warm air mass moving over Europe from the west coast of Africa
[[link removed]] brought
the unseasonable weather.

A variety of factors likely contributed to the unsettling heat, said
London-based meteorologist Scott Duncan. An ongoing La Niña event is
still affecting weather extremes around the world. Parts of the North
Pacific and the Mediterranean have also been unusually warm, which can
boost temperatures in Europe.

And climate change is steadily raising global temperatures, making
extreme heat more likely and more severe.

“Our warming atmosphere and oceans are ultimately making temperature
records easier to break and undoubtedly played a role,” Duncan said
in an email.

A BLESSING IN DISGUISE?

The warm weather is a reminder of the foreboding impacts of a changing
climate. This year, however, it has also provided the European Union
with some relief from a punishing energy crunch that had sent heating
bills for homes and industry skyrocketing.

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Higher temperatures—combined with cuts to consumption and
alternative energies—have helped drive lower demand and prices for
natural gas. Prices were down to around €70 per megawatt hour
Wednesday, their lowest since before Russia invaded Ukraine last
February and sent fuel markets into turmoil.

Lower demand has also allowed countries to refill their gas storage
facilities, which could help ease concerns of supply shortages next
winter.

If inventories are high at the end of winter, countries will need to
import less gas over the summer, relieving pressure on the market,
said Anne-Sophie Corbeau, an expert on natural gas at Columbia
University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.

Even with that positive outlook, some leaders have continued to push
citizens to save energy. The winter heat wave has also stirred concern
among Europeans, who tend to be aware of climate change.

“It’s very nice to be out in the sun, to be eating ice cream in
December, but people really realize now that this is not normal,”
said Corbeau.

The latest weather event comes after a summer of climate extremes
ramped up energy demand as the European Union hunted for alternatives
to Russian fossil fuels (_Climatewire_
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Aug. 21, 2022).

It could also have ripple effects. Ski resorts in the Alps, for
example, are virtually snow-free and some had to close before the
season got underway, said Luca Bergamaschi, director of international
politics at ECCO, an Italian climate change think tank.

“The problem is, that everyone knows that this is not just one
winter, but this is going to be probably much more normal. And all of
a sudden businesses and countries find themselves unprepared for
that,” he said.

TIGHTROPE WALK

Demand for gas was falling before the heat wave due to a campaign by
the European Union to reduce energy use through a combination of
conservation measures and alternative fuels, including coal. At the
same time, imports of liquefied natural gas from the United States and
elsewhere roughly doubled in 2022, partially making up for the loss of
Russian gas.

“Markets worked very well in terms of both bringing the necessary
volumes to Europe during the crisis and making sure that nobody had to
be kind of forcefully switched off,” said Georg Zachmann, a senior
fellow at Bruegel, a Brussels-based think tank. “And now that there
is a relaxation in the fundamentals, we see that being translated also
in our relaxation of prices.”

But Europe’s troubles are not over.

Russian gas imports will be far lower than last year, meaning the
European Union will need to continue looking for alternative sources,
while reducing energy use and building out wind and solar generation.

Although gas prices are down significantly, they’re still five times
higher than the 10-year average and well above prices in the United
States.

And if China’s economy heats up in 2023, or if Japan has a cold
snap, increased competition over gas might draw LNG volumes away from
Europe, creating a shortfall.

“It’s going to be a tightrope walk for quite a while because,
essentially, every individual item that might break might bring us
back into crisis mode,” said Zachmann.

That also means the European Union’s biggest energy users are likely
to shore up their supplies.

Germany—Europe’s largest economy—has invested in LNG terminals
for additional imports and restarted some coal-fired power plants,
while delaying the decommissioning of others.

Climate activists have questioned whether the build-out of such
infrastructure is needed. Others say those moves are part of a broader
effort to diversify Germany’s gas supply and build some cushion into
the system to make it more resilient to future energy shocks.

DEMAND SHIFTS

Meanwhile, climate-related extremes are expected to intensify.

Winter warm spells will likely grow more frequent and severe in the
future. And winters across Europe, in general, are getting milder,
according to Freja Vamborg, a senior scientist with the European
Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.

Long term, that means energy demand may lessen during the cold months.
But Europe’s famously mild summers are also growing hotter—and
more prone to brutal heat waves.

One recent study
[[link removed]] found that heat
waves are increasing in frequency about three times faster in Western
Europe than elsewhere in the midlatitudes, and they’re intensifying
about four times as fast.

As a result, high electricity demand may shift from winter to summer
in parts of the continent over the next decade. One 2017 study
[[link removed]] that looked
at 35 countries found that energy demand would likely increase overall
in southern parts of Europe under a relatively moderate climate
scenario, while decreasing in the north.

Other studies have come to similar conclusions. In more moderate
future climate scenarios, overall energy demand for the year might not
change, but summer could become the time of greatest stress for
Europe’s energy infrastructure.

“We still have the same problems we had before,” said Corbeau of
Columbia University. “OK, the situation is a little bit better, but
it’s not like, ’Oh, now we’re fine.’ No, we’re not fine.”

_CHELSEA HARVEY is a reporter with E&E News._

_Recent Articles by Chelsea Harvey_

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_SARA SCHONHARDT is a reporter with E&E News._

_Recent Articles by Sara Schonhardt_

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