If Russian gas supplies to the Czech Republic were interrupted, normal operations would last at least a month with current supplies. In the longer term, restrictions would probably have to be imposed. However, households would only be affected by restrictions at the very end.
Restrictions would be accepted by the transmission system operator, the private company Net4Gas, which would manage the domestic gas system in an emergency according to the rules laid out in the Energy Act. Net4Gas collects all the information it needs to figure out if there’s a gap between gas supply and demand.
The supply and demand balance is then discussed within the Central Crisis Staff of the gas system. The crisis staff consists of representatives from the gas sector and the Ministry of Industry and Trade.
The Chairman of the Crisis Staff, Radek Benčík, Executive Director for Operations of Net4Gas, can then decide, for example, to prevent an emergency or immediately declare a state of emergency. In this case, he would limit how much people could eat, depending on how bad the outage was.
For as long as possible, one of the most important objectives is to maintain natural gas supply to critical infrastructure operators and protected customers – households, health and social services, food producers, the integrated rescue system, and so on,” Net4Gas confirmed this yesterday.