All Eneco gas traders were able to go on holiday last summer. The great pressure of a year ago has disappeared in the course of the winter. In the dealing room, the excitement has shifted from the gas traders to the colleagues who trade in the energy that will eventually replace gas. Meteorologists and power traders are scrutinizing wildly fluctuating graphs showing solar and wind energy.
Which is not to say that gas trading is back to normal. Due to the great dependence on LNG, the TTF is nowadays swaying in that global market. That price is usually a lot higher than through the pipes of Gazprom. And much more nervous. Threatened strikes at an Australian LNG plant were enough in recent weeks for prices to almost double. Wiegers: ‘If we get a very harsh winter and an LNG terminal breaks down somewhere, we can really expect major peaks again.’
Last autumn there was fierce debate within the EU about policy to prevent a price peak like last summer. At the beginning of this year, it led to the introduction of a European price cap for gas (not to be confused with the price cap for consumers in the Netherlands). It is a measure that conveys the desired political message: gas may never become more expensive than 180 euros per megawatt hour. But so many preconditions have been included that it is very unlikely that the ceiling will ever come into effect.
And that is exactly what many economists and market experts want. Their conclusion about the gas summer of 2022: of course the high price has caused suffering and damage. But the market has functioned well. That is also what Lucien Wiegers thinks. ‘High prices have again proved to be the solution for high prices.’
Perhaps companies and governments within Europe have outbid each other in panic. This has been criticized by economists, especially in Germany. For example, about the fact that the German government, unlike the Dutch government, put billions of euros in gas in storage last summer without there being a customer for it that winter. As a result, the country has now not only suffered a huge loss, it has also made the market extra tight in those crucial months.
‘But in the trade we notice every day that you didn’t always get the best deal afterwards,’ says Wiegers. ‘Remember that we were very lucky with a mild winter, that could have been different and then we were probably glad that the Germans had stored some extra.’
2023-08-28 02:08:22
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