The standard "smooth out the fluctuations" approach gives an extremely low probability of running out of fuel during the winter at a reasonable cost, but only assuming sufficient fuel imports. Because of the loss of Russian gas and not having sufficient LNG infrastructure to make up it, Europe will burn gas faster than replacement when it's sufficiently cold, and if the cold weather lasts long enough they could run out of gas. So they're now using a more expensive and wasteful strategy of keeping storage closer to full, exactly to reduce the risk of people not having heating during winter.
Just because you’ve got no other option’s doesn’t mean a strategy isn’t “expensive and wasteful”. It just means you’re desperate, so you’ll happily eat the cost.
But long term I would expect Europe to use a much less expensive and wasteful strategy. But obviously it takes time to build and deploy alternatives.
The strategy in question is, more generally, moving volatility in the shoulders of the distribution to the central region. It knowingly subjects us to worse-than-normal price movements in the stable regime so that price movements aren't as crazy when we go out to more extreme regimes.
The alternative would be to, well, not do that. Or any other of a number of volatility-controlling strategies. I don't think any of them are better, but there's always an alternative.
