Title is misleading (they didn’t mention the shutdown being permanent, but rather indefinite).
Hopefully Germany finally stops with its half assed appeasement towards Russia and takes the hit this coming winter and rid itself of its reliance on russia. My question to Germans (since I’m not too versed on this) is how reliable can Norway be as a supplier of natural gas for the time being? If they can supply German this year, Russia is being incredibly stupid.
The big issue they have is that they don't have the terminals available to receipt the imports of Liquified Natural Gas that would come from Norway. Obviously they are building them now, but they don't pop up overnight and the lack of infrastructure limits what they can import from Norway. With some extra big issues over regional distribution. The South has some big issues, and Bavaria in particular has been having some big arguments over a gas storage location in Austria. Although that has been somewhat appeased as apparently it's going - or at least has been - a bit better than expected.
In any case yes, Germany is paying a very deserved price for decades of short-sightedeness and complacency in terms of its energy provision. Putting so much focus on gas imports from an aggressive dictatorship at a time where they knew they had to be reducing fossil fuel reliance just because it was the easiest route - absolutely typical of Merkel era complacency and myopia. Hopefully this will be a wake up call on a whole host of things, but you wouldn't count on it.
