The recently experienced disruptions in the EU's energy supply pointed out that supply crises pose a real thread and the member states must be better prepared do deal with the related challenges. According to the current practice, member states fill their gas storages independently, while it is not clear how solidarity could be put into practice in the future, i.e. how the accumulated reserves of one or more members may be potentially redistributed to help others in need. In this paper we propose some possible guidelines for a potential solidarity framework, and formalize a game-theoretic model in order to capture the basic features of the problem, considering the related uncertainty of the future conditions related to gas storage levels and possible transmission bottlenecks as well. The proposed mechanism of supply-security related cooperation is based on voluntary participation, and may contribute to the more efficient utilization of storage capacities. Via the computational model we demonstrate the operation of the proposed framework on a simple example and show that under the assumption of risk-averse participants, the concept exhibits potential.

翻译：近期欧盟能源供应中断事件表明，供应危机已成为切实威胁，各成员国必须做好准备以应对相关挑战。根据现行实践，成员国各自独立填充其天然气储备，但未来如何落实团结原则——即如何将一国或多国积累的储备重新分配以援助他国——尚不明确。本文针对潜在的团结框架提出若干指导方针，通过形式化博弈论模型刻画该问题的基本特征，同时考虑与天然气储备水平及潜在传输瓶颈相关的未来条件不确定性。所提出的供应安全合作机制基于自愿参与原则，有助于提高储备设施利用效率。通过计算模型在简单案例中演示了所提框架的运行机制，并在风险厌恶型参与者假设下证明该概念具有应用潜力。