From The Economist, December 1:
Klaus Müller should have been an anonymous bureaucrat, but he’s become a celebrity
When Klaus Müller accepted the job as boss of the Federal Network Agency, Germany’s regulator for electricity, natural gas, telecommunications, post and railway markets, he hoped he would spend his time on expanding renewables and laying fibre-optic cables. A former state minister for the environment and agriculture in Schleswig-Holstein, he is close to Robert Habeck, the federal economy minister and a fellow Green. He cares deeply about the Greens’ favourite causes, such as a rapid shift to carbon-neutrality, which make captains of German industry uneasy.
Those priorities will have to wait, Mr Müller admits to The Economist at his office in Bonn. He took over a few days after Russia attacked Ukraine. From day one he has spent the bulk of his time thinking about the supply and distribution of natural gas—the lifeblood of Germany’s industrial economy, the flow of which has been staunched by Russia in response to Western sanctions. “We are in significantly better shape than everyone forecast this summer,” he says reassuringly. But, he quickly adds, it is not an all-clear.
The war in Ukraine has turned Mr Müller from an anonymous bureaucrat into a celebrity. He is a frequent guest of popular tv talk shows and has tens of thousands of followers on Twitter. His agency’s detailed updates every weekday on the state of gas supply are read by millions. When he strikes an optimistic note, the nation breathes a collective sigh of relief. When he sends a note of caution, as he did in a tweet on November 28th warning that the temperature in Germany for the next seven days would be 2°C below the average for the period over the past four years, it shudders.
The reason Germans—and German industrialists in particular—hang on Mr Müller’s every word is that he could yet be in charge of rationing gas for the country. Were the government to take the unprecedented step of declaring a gas emergency, his agency is ready to mobilise 75 staff working in shifts around the clock from a windowless room in one of the agency’s nondescript 1960s office blocks, equipped with huge communication terminals, its own diesel-powered generator for electricity, a water tank, showers, around 20 camp beds and stocks of freeze-dried food....
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