That gas storage facility got closed down because it didn't make economic sense to operate any more - the big summer-winter price swings that made it viable had

That gas storage facility got closed down because it didn't make economic sense to operate any more - the big summer-winter price swings that made it viable had ceased to exist (possibly because more widespread use of gas for electricity generation caused more gas usage in summer, I'm not sure) and it had physical limitations on how fast gas could be injected and extracted that meant smoothing over those seasonal changes was all it was really useful for. It still didn't even make sense during the whole Russia thing. Over in mainland Europe, gas storage was vital to dealing with Russia cutting off supplies because their gas infrastructure was physically incapable of importing gas from non-Russian sources fast enough to keep up with winter demand (if I remember rightly, even if they cut back massively on non-essential gas usage). So they basically needed full gas storage just to survive the winter, and of course Russia had made sure it was emptied out the winter before. The UK didn't have this limitation. This need to fill gas storage caused huge problems - global gas demand was already quite high and it takes a long time for supplies to be redirected and high-energy industries to reduce usage, so prices spiked sky-high at first. As a result, mainland Europe ended up filling its gas storage at close to the all-time-high price and emptying it out when prices were much lower, effectively buying high and selling low funded by extra charges on people's energy bills with the high prices being more or less a direct consequence of the fact that they couldn't just put off buying their gas until winter. If the UK government had done the same, the press here would never have shut up about how much money they "wasted" on it.