Heating: The plan to return 1.5 million households to oil – What will happen to natural gas

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Meetings upon meetings at the finance ministry as the government tries to find a way to build a wall of protection around households to keep them from freezing in winter.

By Chrysostomos Tsoufis

The entire campaign around the promotion of one of the most popular TV series of all time, I mean Game of thrones, revolved around one very small phrase… WINTER IS COMING. But if the speaker of this phrase in the world of Westeros, Ned Stark, was treated as Cassandra, in Europe and therefore also in Greece of 2022, that winter is coming – and it will be heavy – is a certainty.

That’s why me meetings upon meetings in the Ministry of Finance the government is trying to find a way to raise one protection wall – not like the one in GoT that eventually went down – around households so not to thaw in winter.

As SKAI is informed, the protection of households will also be attempted in ways that until last year would have been considered rather…unconventional. The government will address through the Prime Minister’s announcements at the TIF – the approximately 1.5 million households that last winter used air conditioners to warm themselves and as a result … pinched their budgets. It is estimated that 9/10 of these households have oil boilers….spider, but functional. So providing cheaper oil in these households will be motivated to put the boiler back on.

At the same time, ways of support are being sought for the approximately 700,000 households that have chosen natural gas for their heating and that, of course, €40/Mwh is not even enough for … live. A mix of interventions is being sought which will include both fuel switching incentives and an increase in subsidy. Here, however, the situation is much more complicated because the strong fluctuations in the price of natural gas do not allow the financial staff to have a clear picture of the intervention required, so again we will proceed based on different scenarios.

Perhaps greater certainty than the coming winter is the fact that the government’s subsidies to electricity bills will continue throughout the year.

September even finds the government supporting households and businesses with 1.9 billion. € with approximately € 800 million of these coming from public funds, which constitute the largest monthly support since the beginning of the energy crisis. The example given by the energy minister Kostas Skrekas speaking to SKAI is typical, that for a consumption of 400 Kwh, without the state subsidy a household would pay €315. With the subsidy, the amount drops to just €60.

However, the resources are not endless, especially when in 2023 the country must return to a primary surplus for this reason and the government is relieved to see in the last few days that Europe is waking up from its … lethargy and according to German Chancellor Scholz to she is now ready to make quick decisions.

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