Of course, very cold weather explains the stress, but imagine what it would have been if the baseline consumption have been the "normal" few % higher...

The resilience of our energy infrastructure seems to be weakening.

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

Europe's disorganized approach to energy security once again threatens to leave its citizens out in the cold. After Russia and Belarus failed to agree on tariff rates for crude oil exports when the previous agreement expired on New Year's Eve, Russia briefly cut off oil supplies to its smaller neighbor. This left Western Europe, which relies on Belarus to re-export much of its oil supply, facing the possibility of energy disruptions in the dead of winter. This dispute is just the latest example of how Europe is paying the price for its unwillingness to invest in new energy sources...

Unless Europeans are prepared to match the Chinese dollar for dollar (or rather, euro for yuan), EU policymakers need to develop alternatives to provide their citizens with meaningful energy security. As of now, Europe still has a number of viable strategic options.

The European Union needs to tackle its energy problems as a collective, instead of a haphazard collection of individual states only looking out for their short-term interest. Europe should develop an approach modeled off NATO's collective security pact, where members -- potentially including the United States -- would agree to share reserves and help each other in the event of a future energy disruption. Nowhere is this more necessary than in Central Europe, which is most dependent on Russia. Brussels has provided countries with a variety of regulatory options, and Central European governments must ensure that they synchronize their laws to provide the strongest possible protection against foreign energy monopolies and predatory behavior in the marketplace. Finally, Europe must abandon its emphasis on pipelines and look for other options to diversify its energy supply. Liquid natural gas transported in tanker ships, for example, would allow Central European consumers greater access to the global market for energy, forcing Russia to compete alongside producers from Qatar and Nigeria.

Barroso was correct: Europe needs a more unified response to energy. However, rhetoric alone will not heat European homes and businesses during the next crisis. If the European Union is going to deliver more than pipe dreams, it will have to bring its policy in line with its ambitions.

Doran's focus seems entirely on fossil fuels and willfully overlooks Europe's investment in wind and solar. There are other ways to heat homes in Europe other than burning natural gas.

Swapping pipelines for tankers seems to me to be ignoring the problem that dependency on a foreign source of energy creates. Is exchanging reliance on floating pipelines in the form of supertankers any more secure than a relinace on overland pipelines?

Reading between the lines, I question Doran's suggestion that the EU would benefit from a NATO-like alliance for energy disruption with the USA, especially without equal consumer prices for oil-derived products and a mishmash of building codes for insulation and energy efficiency. Why should Europeans subsidize cheap energy for Americans?

If we want to get rid of the volatility of the gas market, we need an energy policy that makes gas unnessesary, both for electricity and heat -
heat:
 For low density areas, the country side and suburbs, heat pumps have very good economics - Short time scales for repayment of the investment, and very low maintainance and operating costs, but for the cities where there isnt a convenient garden or field to bury pipes in, the only alternatives to gas heating is electric resistance heaters and district heating.

Carbon neutral district heating means "Build nukes in city centers" what with windmills not producing much waste heat, and while that would probably become politically possible if people wiev it as a choice between that and freezing, it also means we would need a nuclear design that was easily scaled to the size of the city in need of heating, rather than the actual current situation of "reactors come in a choice of Enourmous, gigantic, and mindnumbingly large" -

Electric resistance heating works with any source of power, and if designs with heatsinks are employed, could do demand management by heating said sink at night during minium power demand and price, but this also means that power needs to be cheap and reliable, which again, means nukes, tough this solution plays nicer with the actually existing designs, and lets you place the reactors where you like.

Peak electricity dispatch: Only even remotely economic way to displace gas here, is with pumped storage facilities, which are not strictly speaking generation, but more a way to turn base generation into peak generation.