But long term, despite their history of moronic energy policy, I don't see the EU making itself dependent again on Russian gas (or any other critical commodity). Which is kind of a problem for a commodity driven economy like Russia.
It's the fossil fuel industry claiming they don't, because good energy policy in the 21st century means dropping fossil fuels over the next couple of decades and the more and faster nations follow the EUs lead, the less power the fossil fuel industry and Russia/Saudi Arabia etc have.
That's why there were so many people excited in the comments here at the thought of europeans freezing to death this winter.
Finally after being mocked for decades for saying green energy was unreliable, and climate change didn't exist, they've been proved right by a fossil fuel producer tactically, but not strategically, cutting off their sales at short notice for political reasons during a war, lying about it being the EUs green policies at fault and failing to achieve anything by doing so.
Russia never had a lot of options, and while it would have been better for Russians living standards to "roll over and accept defeat", this would have been political suicide for any regime.
I see similarities.
Russians have no voice there.
We're looking at likely blackouts in Germany, things that only happened in third world hell holes and Texas until recently.
Or were you thinking of compensating for the BTUs consumed in winter to heat homes? Even in that case today's heat pumps are dramatically more efficient than they were 30 years ago and they were already more efficient than gas furnaces, even then. There's a lot that can be done to dramatically reduce the amount of energy required to heat homes to the level we're heating them today.