The energy crisis is omnipresent in Germany. While gas storage levels are currently fairly high compared to last year, gas and electricity prices continue to skyrocket.

Quadrupling or quintupling of gas bills is not uncommon. As temperatures fall and demand for gas increases, companies should be thinking about saving energy.

Our first blog post in this series explored the question of whether how far employers might be obliged to pay employees' wages if government restrictions on gas supply resulted in a halt to production. (You can read this blogpost here.)

This second post in our series concerns measures companies can take to save gas and energy. As well as general energy-saving measures, employment law can also be used to reduce energy usage.

General energy-saving measures

Employers may benefit from general energy-saving measures, although a new energy saving regulation allows private employers to reduce heating costs by lowering temperatures in workspaces.

1. Process optimisation

As in private households, small daily energy-saving measures can add up over time. These include switching off lights, computers and other ‘energy vampire’ devices at the plug, instead of leaving them in stand-by mode.

Motion detectors for lights can help in less used rooms such as corridors or toilet areas. Switching off hot water for hand washing is technically legal (the Technical Rules for Workplaces or Technischen Regeln für Arbeitsstätten - ASR specify that, under the German Workplace...

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