Fears of winter gas shortages trigger Germany’s coal rush

“Such a rush in the summer, everyone wants coalwe have never seen anything like it, “says Frithjof Engelke, a Berlin supplier of this disused fuel and once again coveted in Germany due to the gas crisis which is expected to worsen from the autumn.

The feared shortage of Russian gas due to the war in Ukraine is causing an unusual question of the details of this form of heating, despite its harmfulness.

Per Engelke, head of the century-old family business Hans Engelke Energie, “the holidays will have to wait”.

Now you have to take orders, organize truck deliveries – you are already scheduled until October – and prepare the product for those who go directly to your warehouse for purchase.

The return

On a hot August day, weigh and pack the charcoal in the middle of the dust and the noise of his filler and then he places the bags on the pallets.

In Berlin, between 5,000 and 6,000 homes are still heated with coala tiny fraction of the 1.9 million that make up the housing stock, indicates the city council.

These are generally elderly people, sometimes totally dependent on this fuel and living in old houses that have never been renovated. Or, lovers of the intense heat that emanates from old stoves.

But this year new customers arrived “en masse”says Engelke, whose small business also sells pellets (wood grain fuel) or fuel oil.

Now “those who normally use gas but still have a stove at home want coal”, a phenomenon, according to him, widespread throughout Germany.

Jean Blum is part of that group.

“I am buying coal for the first time in many years”The 55-year-old, bearded, white-haired man tells AFP as he loads 25kg bags full of black rock into his trailer.

Increase

Since he started to have gas in his house, he would turn on the stove from time to time, and only with wood, he explains.

But with the rise in the price of gas, which will worsen from October when operators will be able to pass on the rise in energy prices to the consumer, you want to make sure you are well equipped.

“Even if it’s bad for your health, it’s still better than being cold,” he says.

Though the price of coal also went up by 30%it is even cheaper than wood, the prices of which have doubled.

Black fuel is experiencing a boom in the country.

the German government has already decided to increase the use of power plants to meet the enormous electrical needs of your industry.

And this, despite, as Chancellor Olaf Scholz recently declared, does not give up its goal of abandoning this polluting energy by 2030 and excludes “a resurgence of fossil fuels, particularly coal”.

But with all those new private customers arriving, it’s hard to keep up with the high demand and the many small coal traders in the capital. they have nothing left to sell.

“We produce at full capacity during the summer, with three shifts, seven days a week,” Thoralf Schirmer, spokesperson for the LEAG company, located in the Lusatia (east) mining basin, tells AFP.

The other factory that supplies the market in Germany, based in the Rhine basin, it will stop producing at the end of the yearfurther reducing the offer at a time when Vladimir Putin has already partially cut off the gas tap to Germany.

“I’m a bit afraid of winter,” admits Frithjof Engelke. Nowadays, people seem calm when they learn they will have to wait at least two months before receiving your order, He says. “Things will be different when it gets cold outside,” he says.

AFP agency

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