Against the background of the Ukraine war, the federal government is introducing a law to secure gas reserves.
The key points of the law, which was passed on to the other departments by the Ministry of Economic Affairs on Monday, are to be seen from the key points of the law with specifications for minimum filling levels of the storage facilities.
It stipulates that the storage tanks must be 65 percent full at the beginning of August and 80 percent at the beginning of October.
It must be 90 percent at the beginning of December and at least 40 percent in February.
A subsidiary of the gas pipeline operator, which advertises the gas quantities, is said to be responsible for filling.
The costs are passed on to the network charges and ultimately to the customers.
The German storage facilities can hold around a quarter of the natural gas required each year.
At the beginning of this winter, however, the reservoirs were comparatively low, which worried the federal government.
One reason for the high prices was that Russia hardly supplied any additional gas beyond the supply contracts.
A third of the storage facilities belong to the Russian gas company Gazprom, which were particularly empty.