The once-destroyed community that’s now a global energy giant

Nowhere is that exposure felt more sharply than in Germany, the EU’s biggest manufacturer, producing more than a quarter of the block’s industrial output.

At InfraLeuna, a vast chemicals and plastics industrial park in central Germany, boss Christof Guenther has watched his site’s annual gas bill climb from €60m ($68m; £51m) before the war in Ukraine, to an expected €200m this year amid the Iran crisis.

American gas isn’t the answer, he says. “[Domestic] natural gas prices in the US are about 20 to 25% of the prices we are paying here.” After being turned into LPG and shipped across the Atlantic the price shoots up.

With natural gas accounting for 12% of German power generation, and with half of German homes fitted with gas boilers, German households are also being affected.

The average home now pays 31% more for its electricity than before the Ukraine war, according to Clean Energy Wire, a Berlin-based news outlet covering Germany’s energy transition. Gas prices for German households are also up over that period, over 74%, per the same source.

That is replicated across the European Union, where household electricity bills have risen 30% since 2021, according to official Eurostat figures.

Meanwhile, UK electricity prices are now around 38% higher than in mid-2021, while gas prices are at a 120% increase, according to data by regulator Ofgem.