From August to March next year, the EU countries want to use at least 15 percent less fossil gas than the average over the past five winters. So far, Austria has reached the target and reduced its gas consumption – but also thanks to warm temperatures. According to Wifo, however, a cold winter could lead to the savings targets not being achieved in the future.
Austria has reduced its gas consumption by 17 percent between August and mid-December 2022, more than required by the EU, according to a report by the economic research institute Wifo. Since the beginning of the year, gas consumption has even been below the values of the 2020 lockdown year, the report says. However, the months of October and November were particularly warm.
To find out how much of the savings are due to the warm temperatures, Wifo created a temperature-dependent gas consumption model from the data for the period 2015 to 2021 and used it to predict consumption in 2022. According to Wifo, a comparison of the gas consumption predicted in this way with the actual consumption provides insight into how much of the savings are the result of warm temperatures.
‘Austria does not reach target in cold winter’
According to this, the saving on the total gas consumption in Austria, corrected for the outside temperature, is only seven percent and therefore below the EU target value. Even without generating electricity from gas, the savings are less than 10 percent. “This means that Austria will not meet the European target in an averagely cold winter, even if you exclude the higher gas consumption in electricity generation,” write the two authors Peter Reschenhofer of Wifo and Johannes Schmidt of the University of Natural Resources and Life. Sciences Vienna (Boku). .
Source: Krone
I’m Ben Stock, a journalist and author at Today Times Live. I specialize in economic news and have been working in the news industry for over five years. My experience spans from local journalism to international business reporting. In my career I’ve had the opportunity to interview some of the world’s leading economists and financial experts, giving me an insight into global trends that is unique among journalists.
