The European Commission has praised the country for clearing the EU's winter-preparedness target with room to spare.
The picture looks very different in Germany, where storage sits at just 55% — among the lowest in the EU, ahead of only Latvia and the Netherlands — despite Germany possessing the bloc's largest overall storage capacity.
That gap has raised a question in Warsaw: could Poland eventually be called on to help supply gas to Germany or other neighbors? The answer, for now, is not automatically. Having fuller storage tanks does not by itself create an obligation to share. An EU solidarity mechanism does exist, but it can only be activated in a genuine emergency — specifically, if a member state can no longer guarantee gas to protected users such as hospitals and schools. Even then, the affected country would first have to declare the EU's highest crisis tier, exhaust other market options, and formally request help from nations connected to it by pipeline before any gas-sharing obligation would kick in.
That threshold has never been reached. The mechanism was not activated even at the height of Europe's 2022 energy crisis, and officials describe its use today as a purely theoretical scenario given how resilient the EU energy market has proven.
The Commission's assessment, delivered after a Sept. 3 meeting of the bloc's Gas Coordination Group, found no immediate risk to EU supply security despite storage levels running lower than in past years across much of the continent. Member states and the Commission believe current reserves can still reach adequate levels before winter sets in.
The solidarity framework itself traces back to Poland. After gas disputes with Russia disrupted supplies between 2006 and 2009, Warsaw pushed the EU to adopt stronger energy-solidarity rules — motivated chiefly by concerns about securing its own supply. At the time, few anticipated that Poland might someday find itself on the other side of the arrangement, as a potential source of help rather than a country seeking it.
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Source: RMF24