Dutch gas storage was 45,3 percent full on 25 August: the 115 TWh target for 1 November is out of reach

The Netherlands will not reach its gas storage target for this winter. Reporting by keuze.nl on 26 August put the fill level of Dutch underground storage at 45,3 percent on 25 August, against a target of 115 terawatt hours by 1 November, roughly half of what the country burns in a year, with a separate European requirement of 74 percent by 1 December. On the same day gaslicht.com quoted Gasunie confirming that the fill target will not be met this winter. This is not a warning that homes will run out; gas keeps flowing on an open market. It means the cushion going into winter is thinner than usual, so a long cold spell or a supply problem has more room to move the price. For a household here, only one decision actually needs making before October: whether to lock your rate for the coming heating season.

Gasunie has explained the mechanism behind the slow filling. In a normal year summer gas is cheap and winter gas is dear, and that spread is what pays a storage company. This year the spread has largely disappeared, so for many companies reselling summer gas immediately beats holding it until winter, and the caverns fill slowly. Knowing that is what tells you why waiting to see whether prices fall is a weaker bet than usual. The sum you can fill in yourself works like this: dig out last year's annual energy statement and copy your own electricity use in kilowatt hours and your gas use in cubic metres. Then open any fixed-rate quotation page, remembering that those annual figures are almost always modelled on 2.500 kilowatt hours and 1.000 cubic metres. The cheapest one-year fixed contract listed by keuze.nl on 26 August came to 2.249 euro a year, or 187,38 euro a month, at exactly that model usage. Divide your household's usage by the model usage, multiply by the quoted annual figure, and compare the result against the annualised cost of your current contract. That difference is the real price of locking in.

• The confirmed figures: 45,3 percent filled on 25 August, a target of 115 terawatt hours by 1 November, a European requirement of 74 percent by 1 December, and Gasunie confirming on 26 August that the target will be missed
• The cause is the spread, not scarcity: with summer and winter prices close together, reselling beats storing, so filling has fallen behind
• Who should act: households whose contract ends before March have the most reason to run the numbers now; anyone already inside a long fixed contract is unaffected this winter and can leave it alone
• Limits and next step: a fixed contract buys certainty, not a low price, and what you would be locking in today is a high level. Read the early-termination clause before you sign, then run the usage-scaled sum above
• No reason to stockpile or panic: low storage widens the range the price can move in, it does not decide whether there is gas in the pipe

Hokimi field note: copy the two numbers from your annual statement, kilowatt hours and cubic metres, into a note on your phone. From then on any quotation expressed as a yearly figure takes thirty seconds to convert into your own. Without those two numbers, every comparison page you read is somebody else's bill. Sources: source 1, source 2, source 3.