So, I might be remembering wrong, but a major part of the push for gas power was under Voznesensky. He was famously numbers-obsessed, but that resulted in useful things like wanted to curb smog in cities because reducing respiratory illnesses would save boatloads of cash on medical costs. Now I'm imagining somebody revisiting his calculations, and determining that the money the government would save by cutting gas power is more than the increased costs it would have to bear from expanding coal power (either for caring for people with lung cancer and shit, or for putting the power station infrastructure far away enough from town that the smog doesn't spread there).
An ugly sausage, but I hope that it was at least something like this that happened (and that they did the math right), and not the energy department unilaterally going "screw the public health impact, coal cheap".
Heating systems for burning in cities with central heating or decentralized for apartment blocks as a good means of low-cost infrastructure for energy transport, some energy production off of increasing power generation, and whatever isn't used or sold off via pipelines gets flared or vented. Also your heat pumps are nowhere near capable enough to replace gas heating, not remotely in the conditions you are in. Their over glorified window AC's that can maybe shift the temperature by 10 degrees, nothing remotely capable enough to keep up with winter weather.
We have so much gas we don't know what to do with it, and those chucklefucks in SupSov still won't let us build CCGP plants to makes use of something that is so plentiful we're just
throwing it away otherwise. Those coal mines and canals to enable them don't build themselves either!
Thanks for the reminder about the heat pumps though. Yeah, Russian winter is harsh.
I have no hard numbers or general knowledge about how Blackstar would do it but i figure you would at least have a +20 for every dice like an inverse of what happend when we went under and then more expensive because higher labour prices are always worse. With that said this is all very minutie as i suspect that most of the expansions would take like 1 or 2 GL like banking or childcare so it won't be budget breaking it is just not a resource we are swimming in. I also don't think we are ever going to get near 60 as more expensive dice + enterprises likely slimming down massively when they can't afford as much cheap labour means in my mind we won't go over 60 unless we deliberatly sabotage ourselves.
This turn general labor fell into the bottom bracket (<20) and we only had a general decrease in cost of 10 RpD. I doubt the impact of labor price around the middle bracket (no effects for all other indices, don't see why this one would be different) would be so asymmetrical that just going into the second highest would raise global prices by a whopping 20 RpD.
