Onshore facilities on the territory of the gas distribution center. File photo MOSCOW, May 23. The head of the International Energy Agency (IEA), Fatih Birol, speaking at the economic forum in Davos, called on Europeans to lower the temperature on the regulators in their homes in order to reduce dependence on Russian energy resources. He said that the IEA has developed a ten-point plan to achieve this goal.
"The winter in Europe will be quite difficult, including Germany. One of our analyzes shows that if we adjust the temperature on the thermostat, lowering it by two degrees, then this will be enough to save 20 billion cubic meters, which is equivalent to gas coming from the first Nord Stream,» Birol said. .
At the same time, he made a mistake in the data, underestimating the capacity of the gas pipeline by three times. So, in 2020 and 2021, 59.2 billion cubic meters came from Russia to Germany through this pipe. These figures set a record for the gas pipeline. Now Nord Stream is Gazprom's main route for gas supplies to Europe.Expert: Poland's statements on gas — in the spirit of «who abandoned whom before» The IEA in March, after the start of Russia's special military operation in Ukraine, published two plans on how Europe could reduce its dependence on Russian oil and gas. For example, the agency believes that lowering the temperature in a home by one degree Celsius can reduce the annual need for gas by ten billion cubic meters. At the same time, in April, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, as well as the OPEC + alliance, excluded the IEA from the list of independent sources of information for their calculations and replaced it with the analytical companies Wood Mackenzie and Rystad Energy. Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak explained that the decision was due to the bias of the IEA, whose certain attitudes can be traced in statements on the energy market. The IEA appeared in 1974 as part of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development after the oil crisis of 1973-1974. Then some of the largest Arab producers announced an «oil embargo». Now the organization includes 31 countries.