Comment by throwaway473825
4 days ago
As I said, coal makes electricity cheaper if it can eliminate gas, like in China and India. Poland uses a lot of coal, but it doesn't help because it also uses a lot of gas nowadays.
Of course, there are geopolitical considerations. Germany thought that it could cut military spending by buying Russian gas, and Poland believes that it needs to buy American gas for protection. But none of them can compete with China.
Energy is expensive in Germany not because of gas itself but because of the Energiewende combined with reliance on Russian gas. This comes largely from Europe's refusal to use fracking and insistence on lots of wind and solar, which are expensive and unreliable. The UK has gas deposits it could frack, for instance, but refuses to do so because they believe (wrongly in my view) that this would end the world.
Of course they can compete with China. China is rather resource poor for such a big country and has to import lots of its fuel. Energy is cheap(ish) in China because it is willing to use all available energy sources without net zero ideology.