Belgium's case is illustrative of the challenge facing many European economies right now 📉

➡️ Industrial demand was curtailed over summer months to fill storage
➡️ Household demand is set to pick up rapidly over winter months, but must be restrained

Early +ve signs 👇

In the end!

bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

Despite having lost 36 TWh of domestic nuclear&hydro going from exporting 21 TWh in 3Q2021 to importing 10 TWh in 3Q2022 allowed France to increase(!) its electricity demand slightly from 94.7 TWh to 95.3 TWh
Might France finally get in love with the internal electricity market?

Gute Nachrichten zum Wochenende: Wir haben die Daten zum Gasverbrauch um den Effekt der schwankenden Temperaturen bereinigt. Die Leute sparen gegenüber den Vorjahren kontinuierlich etwa 20-30 Prozent. ZEIT ONLINE
(Einordnung & Methodik folgen)

EU energy ministers agreed yesterday to accelerate the development of joint EU gas purchasing in view of the 2023 storage refilling season. In this ⁦Bruegel⁩ paper we discuss options to make this work. bruegel.org/policy-brief/h…

📊 NATURAL GAS DEMAND

High and volatile European energy prices are being driven by extraordinarily tight supply-demand balances in energy markets, particularly for natural gas. The primary solution is to reduce demand. Ben McWilliams Georg Zachmann

👉 buff.ly/3RUBNck

There's coverage in today's press of alleged dispute within govt on whether it should spend £15m on an energy saving campaign; whether that's a good use of public money. To put it in context, the govt expects to spend £14m *an hour* subsidising energy bills this winter. (1/2)

We updated German household gas demand in our tracker to use the new Bnetz source.

The figure below shows small differences in that estimate month-by-month depending on source. (Eurostat is total minus THE industry).

Today we released our new dataset that decomposes country-level gas demand by main sectors.

We hope this is allows for a more timely/granular evaluation of the effects of policies and prices.

Feedback to Ben McWilliams and myself is very welcome:

bruegel.org/dataset/europe…