Quote Originally Posted by Firn View Post
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Poland gets powered by coal which is also mined by a fairly large amount of people.

Coal plants tend to compete with wind as base load so suffer often especially if cheap wind pushes the (upper) rest of the supply/cost curve towards the right. So there is certainly a lot of specific political interest to keep cheap energy out.

2) The Verbund will also suffer from the wind competition with it's plants along the Danube for example, however I guess that they hope for more business for their investment into the grid and their pump storage plants. They also divested fossil fuel lately as it was mostly not competitive under current condidtions.

Of course the Austrian consumer should be happy - just like the Polish one - about German electricity lowering his bill.
I think the issue is that German utilities have often spare coal capacity at peak demand times due to the REs, hence, they can export when there is demand in neighbour countries and kill NG and (older) coal capacity there. France and Poland do not have these cheap excess peak capacities, i.e. they buy more expensive than they export.

Yes, the Austrian Verbund will suffer a little bit, however, some of their problems are unsound investments in fossil energy (Italy) in the past. IMHO they are in a much better position than their German counterparts due to the high RE share, which is to a large extend written off, their German competitors have nothing.

IIRC the Verbund hopes to bring on-line their (open turbine) NG power plants, these are peakers, when the excess fossil capacity is reduced in Germany, this will be around 2018/19.