Research into the reliability of energy suppliers
Published by Lydia Woellwarth,
Editor
World Pipelines,
As a representative survey by the opinion research institute forsa on behalf of the German Eastern Business Association shows, confidence in the reliability of the US as an energy supplier has fallen further. According to the survey, only 10% of Germans still regard the US as a reliable energy supplier. That puts the US behind the Middle East for the first time in the confidence ranking. 14% of German citizens regard the countries in the Middle East as reliable energy suppliers. According to the forsa survey, as before, Germans consider Norway (70%), followed by Canada (44%) and Russia (41%) as the most reliable supplier countries.
The comparison with identical surveys by forsa in the past years shows how rapid the downward trend is for the US. While 50% of German still regarded Americans as a reliable energy partner in September 2017, only 21% of those surveyed shared that view in May 2018. And that figure has now been halved again to 10%. In connection with the loss of confidence, the opinion researchers talk about a “certain Trump effect”. For this reason, another result of the survey is also not entirely surprising for them: more than three quarters of Germans (77%) say they are in favour of Nord Stream 2 being completed, also against the opposition of the US. This demand has a clear majority among the supporters of all the parties represented in the German Bundestag. Approval of the project is especially great among supporters of the SPD (93%), the CDU/CSU (89%), the Left Party (89%) and the Green Party (86%). Only 4% of Germans reject continued construction of the pipeline.
“Despite existing political conflicts, the close partnership that we have had with Russia for 50 years enjoys wide public acceptance,” said Mario Mehren, CEO of Wintershall Dea and Head of the Russia Country Working Group of the German Eastern Business Association, commenting on the survey results.
A fact sheet with the results of the survey can be found on Wintershall’s website.
On behalf of the German Eastern Business Association, the forsa Politik- und Sozialforschung AG surveyed 1006 representative women and men over 18 from 16 - 19 March using computer-aided telephone interviews. The survey results can be applied to the population as a whole with an error tolerance of +/- 3%.
Read the article online at: https://www.worldpipelines.com/business-news/03042020/research-into-the-reliability-of-energy-suppliers/
You might also like
Decouplers making a difference
Jay Warner, Dairyland Electrical Industries, USA, Jerzy Sibila and Jerzy Mossakowski, CORRSTOP, Poland, explain how AC mitigation is a proven technique to solve AC interference problems on pipelines, referring specifically to the use of DC decouplers.