French President Emmanuel Macron warned the country to prepare for a total cutoff of Russian natural gas supplies on Thursday and told citizens to prepare to conserve energy, including by turning off public lights.
Speaking in an interview to commemorate France’s national Bastille Day holiday, Macron said that Russia “is using energy, like it is using food, as a weapon of war.”
His remarks come as the European Union scrambles to secure alternative energy supplies amid fears that Russian state-owned gas giant Gazprom will move to block delivery completely to the EU via its Nord Stream 1 pipeline, which was shut down Monday for a 10-day period of planned maintenance.
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In the interview Thursday, Macron said that the government has been preparing contingency measures in the event of a gas cutoff, including crafting a national “sobriety plan” to help residents conserve energy, such as by turning off lights when they’re not useful.
Western leaders have warned in recent days that Russia could be using the temporary shutdown as a pretext to more permanently halt all gas deliveries to the EU — depriving the bloc of a key source of energy and sending the EU into crisis mode as countries seek to fill their gas storage supplies ahead of winter.
In an interview this weekend, French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire described a total shut-off from Russia as “the most likely scenario” for the EU. “It would be totally irresponsible to ignore this scenario,” he added.
France, which relies on Moscow for roughly 17% of its gas supplies, is less dependent on Russian supplies than some of its EU neighbors, such as Germany, which receives 35% of its gas from Moscow.
France has also been urging a faster shift to offshore wind farms and other ways to diversify its energy sources, he added.
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However, a complete cutoff would mark a seismic shift for energy markets across the EU — and options to secure alternative gas supplies are meager. “It is clear that any extension of the Nord Stream outage would place even more pressure on the German and European gas markets in terms of storage injections, overall gas supply, and market pricing,” said Ed Cox, the head of global LNG at commodity intelligence firm ICIS.
