Dutch gas prices up 86% in one month. Every wasted kWh is now margin walking out the door.

Dutch TTF natural gas futures — the European benchmark — rose 86% between late February and mid-March. Not 86% over a year. Over a month. Meanwhile, EU gas storage sits at 29% — France and Germany near 22%, the Netherlands at 9%. The refill costs this summer are going to be brutal, and those costs will pass through to industrial energy prices well into 2027.

What this means for your operations

When energy was cheap, waste was tolerable. A compressor running through lunch. A chiller cycling too often. Heating or cooling an empty floor because nobody set up a schedule. At €0.15/kWh, these were rounding errors.

At €0.32/kWh, they’re not. Every wasted kWh now costs roughly double what it did eighteen months ago. The waste didn’t increase — the cost of the waste did. And that cost comes straight out of margin.

This is the difference between efficiency (Stack 2 — fixing the process) and margin recovery (Stack 3 — capturing the value you’re currently losing). Efficiency reduces how much energy a process uses. Margin recovery asks: what energy are we burning for literally no productive output?

The answer, in most businesses, is more than anyone expects.

The tactic

Identify your single biggest energy waste this week.

Walk the floor (or ask whoever runs it) and look for:

1. Equipment running outside production hours — machines, lights, HVAC, compressed air that stays on when nobody’s working. Check evenings and weekends if you can.
2. Compressed air leaks — the single most common industrial energy waste. If you can hear hissing, you’re paying for air that’s doing nothing.
3. Heating/cooling overlap — spaces being heated and cooled simultaneously, or conditioned spaces with doors left open.
4. Idle running — equipment that stays powered between jobs instead of being shut down or put on standby.

Pick the most obvious one. Estimate the hours it runs unnecessarily. Multiply by the equipment’s power draw. Multiply by your energy rate.

That’s how much margin is walking out the door each month on just that one item.

The free tool

The Energy Waste Quick-Scan Checklist is a one-page walkthrough for identifying the most common energy waste categories. No equipment required — just eyes and a calculator. Takes 30 minutes on the floor. This finds the gap. The Modern Ops Program closes it.