JEvery day around 100,000 roof tiles roll off the assembly line in the Nelskamp roof tile works near Magdeburg. The halls at the manufacturer’s largest location are filled with the noise of countless machines – the mechanical whirring of the assembly lines, accompanied by the rhythmic hissing and squeaking of the robotic arms. Everything is in motion, cutting, pressing and drying before the bricks are fired in the tunnel kiln at around 1100 degrees.
Anyone standing here – sweating at almost 45 degrees, next to wagons weighing tons on which hundreds of clay bricks are stacked – can hardly imagine that everything came to a standstill here a few weeks ago. The ovens cold. The halls silent.
The family business had to interrupt production at two of its six locations for almost two months. In Groß Ammensleben in Saxony-Anhalt and in Unsleben in Bavaria, there were no furnaces because natural gas was too expensive. “Our production site in Groß Ammensleben consumes so much gas that it could supply a medium-sized town,” explains Managing Director Ulrich Nelskamp.
“Loss of millions” and “fear of existence”
The drying and firing of the bricks in particular is energy-intensive. There are currently no alternatives for the brick and tile industry: “We need natural gas and cannot quickly substitute it with other energy sources.”
The roof tile maker was particularly vulnerable when natural gas prices soared. Last year, the company had to initiate protective shield proceedings, which were completed this spring. “The gas suppliers terminated our gas supply contracts at the beginning of the process,” explains Nelskamp. The company was exposed to sharp price jumps on the spot market: While a megawatt hour of natural gas cost around EUR 20 at the beginning of last year, the price shot up to over EUR 300 at the end of August. Instead of 40 percent as before, the share of energy costs in production expenditure is now almost 70 percent.
Nelskamp explains that his company could not afford the gas given the high price. The only way out: shutting down the plants – despite full order books. “That was simply the sheer compulsion from the market price for energy,” Nelskamp clarifies. The amount of bricks that could not be produced during the production stop corresponds to about 3,500 single-family house roofs. What would it have meant for the company to continue production? “Millions lost,” Nelskamp replies succinctly.
When the employees shut down the brick kilns, it was not yet clear whether and when things could continue. “The whole thing basically happened overnight,” says Dieter Beckert, who has managed the Nelskamp works in Groß Ammensleben for almost ten years. The company had to put almost half of the 220 employees at its location on short-time work. “They had existential fears,” says Beckert. “They were obviously worried about how this was going to go because they also have their own bills to pay.”
“We would have knocked ourselves out”
The company’s application for short-time work benefits was rejected by the local employment agencies. A spokeswoman for the Federal Employment Agency explained on request that price increases, including high energy prices, are a “usual, general market risk”. If a company shuts down its systems because they can no longer be operated economically, that is a business decision. Therefore, no short-time allowance can be granted – an additional burden for the roof tile manufacturer.
Beckert has been working in the brick industry for more than thirty years. His industry is not used to shutdowns. It takes about two weeks just to slowly shut down and restart the brick kilns so as not to damage the systems. Mountains of rubble are piling up in front of his plant: the remains of the roof tiles that were in the ovens when they were switched on and off and broke – around 40,000 pieces per oven, the plant manager estimates.
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