Bavarian officials and state employees should now avoid business trips as far as possible, and if a matter cannot be solved via video conference, it is better to use public transport or a bicycle than to travel by car. This is one of the measures with which the state government wants to save 15 percent of the energy that the free state agencies have recently used. According to Head of State Florian Herrmann (CSU), the fact that the Council of Ministers decided not to go on a business trip to St. Bartholomä am Königssee on Tuesday, where this and all other resolutions should have been taken and announced, was not at all due to the new “five-point Plan of measures to reduce energy consumption in the state administration”. But the probability of rain of 80 percent, which could be read on Monday from the weather forecast for Königssee.
After all, Agriculture Minister Michael Kaniber (CSU) would not have had far to go home from there on Tuesday – by the way, with the best leisure weather – and Economics Minister Hubert Aiwanger (FW) would have driven roughly in the same direction anyway, only to cross the border later in the afternoon Salzburg to discuss the filling level of the Haidach natural gas storage facility, which is particularly important for Bavaria. However, it was the task of Building Minister Christian Bernreiter (CSU) to present the five-point savings plan, which was provisionally set to run until the end of March, with which the state is reacting to the current energy crisis. He announced that Bavaria’s authorities would not heat above the “legal minimum” of 20 degrees Celsius in the coming winter and would reduce the temperature in the hallways or in stairwells and cellars even further if possible. Light should also only be on when someone is actually there, which also applies to the outside lighting of government buildings.
If it’s too cold for you, you can work from home
The cabinet wants all heating and air conditioning to be precisely adjusted and turned down at night and at weekends, and if a civil servant attaches greater importance to higher temperatures at his desk or to warm water for washing his hands in the coming months, then he has the broadest possible permission from his employer to work a lot in the home office. In any case, the water should only come out of the taps cold in the sanitary areas of the offices. The information that has also been announced on energy-saving ventilation and how to deal with the power-guzzling stand-by operation of electronic devices will also reach state officials at home.
According to the State Chancellery, the Free State itself has around 11,000 buildings and structures, of which around 9,000 are “energy-related”, i.e. heated or illuminated. For this, the state consumes around one percent of the total amount required in Bavaria for both gas and electricity. As far as the public schools are concerned, which have just gone into the long holidays anyway, according to Bernreiter, the energy saving resolutions have the character of recommendations for the responsible municipalities.
The winter of 2023 will be “even worse”
The cabinet is now taking a summer break, but Aiwanger is already warning of the coming winter when it comes to energy supply. It will empty the gas storage completely, which is why the following winter of 2023/24 could be “even worse than this one”. Bavaria’s gas storage tanks are currently about 65 percent full, and those in all of Germany about 70 percent, said Aiwanger before leaving for Haidach. There in Haidach, the storage facility that belongs to the state-owned Russian energy company Gazprom is still empty.
At the moment, however, natural gas for power generation is still being “exploited on a large scale” in Germany instead of allowing the three nuclear power plants that are still active to run longer or putting plants that have just been shut down back into operation. But the federal government is “on a rampage” and is just watching how the reactor in Gundremmingen is being dismantled. For Aiwanger, she is guilty of “failing to provide assistance to ensure Germany’s energy supply.” “Of course it would be better if we had them than we don’t have them,” Aiwanger says of wind turbines. Criticism that Bavaria had recently prevented the expansion, but he dismisses it as “cheap propaganda”.