The contingency plan proposed by the Government is designed to prepare the citizens for the reduction or halt in the supply of natural gas, not to scare them, said Deputy Prime Minister Andrei Spînu. According to him, Gazprom cut or fully ceased gas supplies to states that are much richer than the Republic of Moldova, such as Germany, Poland and Bulgaria. This obliges the authorities to take into account a similar scenario. Online learning is a method of economizing on energy resources, but this will not be applied in September and October, including in schools that do not use gas heating, IPN reports.
If Gazprom cuts gas supplies, online learning will be applied for ten days a month. “No one wants education to be online. Definitely, in September-October all the students will attend classes physically. We believe this will happen in November too. A crisis situation can appear later, but we will take decisions depending on the created situation. At the same time, there are many schools that use gas heating. They will definitely not use online learning. We present this plan only to assure the citizens that the Government is ready to act so as to support the citizens,” the official stated when presenting the progress report of the Gavrilița Government in a year of its installment.
Andrei Spînu said that Moldova’s energy security is the Government’s priority. Actions have been taken to purchase and store natural gas and to diversify the energy sources so that the Republic of Moldova is no longer dependent on one gas supplier. “We ultimately started work on the Energy Strategy 2050. We are a government that looks into the future. In autumn we will have the first concept of the energy strategy. We want diversification. We can no longer be a country dependent on one source of energy. The gas law was adopted and this obliges us to create strategic gas stores so that we are not in the situation when we don’t know if we will have gas the next days or not. As we promised, we will fully implement the Third Energy Package,” stated Andrei Spînu.
He provided details about the contingency plan proposed earlier for economizing on energy sources. In accordance with the document, if the gas supplies are reduced by 35% or 50%, the temperature of heat in the centralized heating system will be decreased by 10% and street lighting will be turned off after 11pm. The working program will be optimized (remote shifts, reduced working hours). There was already announced the plan for offering support for purchasing firewood. The citizens will be informed about all the Government’s actions.
Under the plan proposed by the Government, if the natural gas supplies are limited or fully ceased, the interruptible consumers will start to be disconnected partially starting with November and amounts of gas will be bought form other sources or from the spot market.
