What's up with the German gas consumption?
There is either some oddity in German energy statistics or an economic miracle in making.
BundesNetzAgentur, the German state agency in charge of energy networks, and currently tasked with providing data on German energy security, proudly states that in June Germany consumed 33.6 TWh of gas compared to 46.1 a year ago. Impressive. One would think that most of the reduction should come from the change in power generation mix – housing sector consumption in July should be quite small, and it is difficult to shift industrial demand to different fuels, as it would require very substantial retooling, and in some cases, when gas is used as a feedstock, next to impossible.
But Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems, the leading German state research body on energy transition, also collecting energy data, shows that in June 2022 Germany generated 7.1 TWh of power on gas-fired plants vs. 7.2 TWh a year ago.
(Gas-fired is the wide orange band just above black coal. Notice the growth between 2015 and 2021.)
Assuming 50% energy efficiency (the best combined-cycle stations achieve 55-57%, so it’s a safe bet), Germany used 14 TWh of gas in the power generation sector, both this year and a year ago. This means that the industrial plus housing consumption went down by more than 11 TWh, from 32 to 20 TWh or a third. Assuming that there still might be 5-10 TWh of housing sector use, does it mean that industrial consumption is almost halved? If so, what was the effect on the output? With all the talk of a terrible recession coming, there are no reports yet on massive stoppages of chemical plants and other gas-hungry stalwarts of the economy.
Or does this means that the two leading data sources are incompatible? Not necessarily a major problem as such, and we should cut some slack to the people gathering this data under a lot of pressure and attention to their subject. However, these numbers are used at the moment as arguments fodder in the public discussion and most likely to support political decision-making. Germany here is the epitome of the EU as a whole – it is the largest gas consumer, it has quite a developed energy data reporting system, so opinions and decisions for the EU as a whole are often based on this data. If German industry is in reality very flexible with its gas demand, without hurting its output, then this should probably be clearly and convincingly communicated to at least partially dissuade the current bearish outlook on the prospects of the European economy and help to stave off a recession. If after all there is a bug in the data and a discrepancy in the data collection and processing, it better be identified and put straight before the things start to get really hot (or really cold) this winter.
We need to have the basic facts straight and form a clear and coherent picture before jumping to conclusions.
What's up with the German gas consumption?
The Bundesnetzagentur apparently issued a correction: now the consumption volumes in July 21 and 22 are almost equal: https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/EN/Areas/Energy/Companies/SecurityOfSupply/GasSupply/grafik_consumption.png?__blob=poster&v=28