On Monday, benchmark prices for natural gas in Europe declined to their lowest in three months amid reports of a new plan in Brussels to bring them down ahead of the coming winter. The front-month Dutch TTF contract, serving as a benchmark for northwest Europe, dropped 7.7 per cent by 03:05 ET (07:05 GMT) to 142 euros a megawatt-hour (MWh), responding to a new plan by the EU Commission for a ‘dynamic price cap’ hatched.

The said plan is the latest attempt by the EU Commission to bridge differences between member states. It is to be noted that various members have not been able to agree on a common strategy to keep prices down to sustainable levels in the absence of gas from Russia.

Russia, Europe’s largest gas supplier, has cut shipments to a trickle in an unsuccessful effort to pressure the EU to drop its support for Ukraine.

According to media reports, a draft of the Commission’s new proposal will likely to put a temporary limit on intraday price movements in the TTF contract, which Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said last month had decoupled from reality. At its peak in March, the TTF had traded as high as 345 EUR/MWh.

Even at today’s levels, which are less than half of the second spike in prices in August, the price of natural gas is up by around ten times from where it has traded for most of the last decade.