German authorities are saying that the pipelines will be rendered unusable if salt-water has entered the pipes. Corrosion will make them unrepairable.

And lets not forget there are a lot of other underwater cables which nations with unreliable energy are now utterly dependent on. Here in Australia, an interconnector trip led to the Statewide blackout in South Australia, and the Bass Strait cable break (not even an act of war) left Tasmania on the verge of one for five months. In both cases they lost hundreds of millions of dollars, but it would be so much worse if that happened today during a global energy crisis when there's is already a bun fight for spare parts and spare fossil fuels.

The UK imports 11% of its power from Europe, half from France, and two years ago President Macron was threatening to block an interconnector in a battle over post-Brexit fisheries.  In a unsettled world, countries which don't have energy security don't have any security at all…