Faced with gas shortages, Europe seeks to reduce its energy demand

In eastern France, a dozen villages turned off their streetlights at midnight. Barcelona offers home energy efficiency assessments. Warsaw subsidizes homes that replace fossil fuel stoves with heat pumps.

With the war in Ukraine driving up oil and gas prices and the President Russian Vladimir V. Putin showing his willingness to use Russia's energy resources as a weapon, cities across Europe are finding different ways to reduce their energy consumption.

As the largest European consumer of Russian gas, Germany is perhaps the country most vulnerable to Russia's energy crisis, but many other countries also face, at a minimum, high prices and to tight supplies.

How severe or mild the onset of winter will be a key factor. A mild winter in Europe would reduce global gas demand, as would continued Covid-related lockdowns in China, which is the world's largest gas consumer. Conversely, a harsh winter with biting temperatures would increase demand and drive up prices.

But European nations are eager to see how the weather turns out.

Seeking to accelerate its energy independence from Russia, Italy has turned to Algeria as a potential new gas supplier, has stepped up renewable energy sources and burned more coal to light running homes and businesses.

French President Emmanuel Macron, who warned that the country should prepare for a total cut off of Russian natural gas, said that to combat the gas shortage, the government would prepare a measured conservation plan to limit energy consumption. He also noted that France's large nuclear industry makes it less vulnerable than some of its European neighbors.

"Russia uses energy, as it uses food, as a weapon of war,” Macron said earlier this month.

Élisabeth Borne, the French prime minister, told lawmakers in early July that France would renationalise its electricity backed by the giant state, Electricité de France, which produces most of the country's electricity and operates all of its nuclear power plants.

En Belgium, the government reversed a decision to phase out nuclear power in 2025 and extended the life of two reactors for another decade, and the Austrian and Dutch governments took steps to switch to power plants in the coal which had been closed or whose closure ure was planned. These actions, however, have raised fears that the European Union's efforts to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 may be sidetracked.

Polish lawmakers have backed measures that would allow them to increase their gas storage capacity and ease fuel-swap rules, Reuters reported. in a report that "although Britain is not dependent on Russian gas to the extent that the rest of Europe is, it is clear that stopping gas flows to Europe could have repercussions, including very high prices...