New refugees from Ukraine are regularly arriving in Bonn. The number varies between 30 and 70 daily. The first point of contact is the refugee reception centre in Buschdorf. All formalities are handled there by the city administration. Afterwards, the refugees are given accommodation in various shelters. "The cooperation with the city of Bonn is quite smooth and has been working well so far," Bonn's DRK President Georg Fenninger draws a positive interim balance after almost two months.

Fenninger expects further relief for the people from Ukraine when the accommodation in the former Rhineland Chamber of Agriculture in Roleber is opened. The first people are expected to move into the buildings on Siebengebirgsstraße on Thursday, 12 May. Until then, craftspeople still have a lot of work to do.

Right now, washing machines, showers and cooking facilities are being installed, and a fleet of donated bicycles is being got ready. "The willingness to help is enormous. This applies to donations in kind, but also to labour. Again and again, citizens from the Holzlar area come by and ask what they can do. That's a good feeling," says the DRK head.

According to Fenninger, the two church congregations, the initiative "Holzlar hilft" (Holzlar helps) and numerous companies from Bonn and Beuel are also a great support in the preparations: "It all happens very unbureaucratically. Not much is asked, but action is taken. And that's why I firmly expect that the shelter in Roleber will be able to start up well-equipped in the next few days."

The buildings of the former Rhineland Chamber of Agriculture, which have been owned by Sahle Wohnen since 1 September 2017, have been provided free of charge by boss Albert Sahle as accommodation for 18 months. The incidental costs incurred will be borne by the city of Bonn. Up to 400 people are to be temporarily housed there. By Thursday, 3548 people from Ukraine had arrived and been registered in Bonn.

(Original article: Holger Willcke)

A Cologne study has extrapolated what would happen if Russian gas stopped flowing.

Natural gas imports account for 55 percent of Germany's total energy demand. Gas is not only a source of energy for a multitude of industrial high-temperature processes, but also a central raw material of the chemical industry, from which a multitude of other substances are produced, which in turn are materials for a wide range of products. From fertiliser and glass to adhesives, paper, plastics and much more. In Germany, industry alone relies on 37 per cent of the country's natural gas.

One of the details that emerged in the study is that Germany's gas emergency was virtually programmed by Russia, which was responsible for sparsely filled gas storage facilities. The Russian Gazprom Group, which owns about 20 per cent of all German storage facilities through subsidiaries, "has not filled them since last summer," says Professor Michael Sterner, of the Energy Networks and Energy Storage Research Centre at the Technical University of Regensburg. This is a disaster for supply security, but also "clearly strategic warmongering, if you will". Putin has thus long planned making energy sanctions difficult for the west following his invasion of Ukraine.

The largest storage facility operated by Gazprom in Rehden, Lower Saxony, is also the largest in Western Europe and is more or less empty - filled to about 0.6 per cent. The Bundestag has since taken countermeasures and passed a new gas storage law that requires 80 percent of the storage to be filled by 1 October of each year, but this does not answer the obvious question: Why did it take so long for someone to notice it was more or less empty?

The bottom line is that Germany will be increasingly hooked on electricity in future. According to expert from the Heidelberg institute for energy and environmental research (ifeu), "we will have to set off a whole fireworks display of savings measures." The old proposals are the new ones: shorter hot showers, speed limits, lowering room temperatures, insulating buildings, reducing electricity-wasting light pollution, car-free Sundays. In other words: create the big picture with 1000 steps. Saving electricity also saves gas for filling storage tanks in winter: as much as 14 percent of imported natural gas becomes electricity.

Pehnt also criticises the false images in people's heads: "At the moment, it sounds like, now we only have to change our behaviour and make small investments. But what is really needed large-scale investment in alternative energies for heating and new infrastructures". Last year, Germany was still "living in a fossil-based, also gas-based world". The numbers are shocking: in 2021, there were 600 000 gas and 50 000 oil heaters sold.

(Original article: Wolfgang Wiedlich)

(Translations: Jean Lennox)