Have you discovered any indications of a long-term, strategic effort by gas interests to capture markets from all other sources of power and heat?

Was the messaging that produced the original decision to exit nuclear, for example, strongly supported by gas interest groups?

Germany also heats and cooks with gas so the problem is quite complex.

Production and transmission costs put a floor on gas prices; there is no parallel floor for wind and solar. In the USA, with gas prices more or less at the floor, wind, solar and storage are starting to cut into the market for gas peaker generators (cheap straight-through turbines that run at most 10% of the time) and have the bigger, more efficient and more expensive baseload combined-cycle plants in their sights. Add to that the indications that fracked US gas is an unsustainable giant bubble/scam, and has never been profitable overall (see deSmog Blog for details).

In Germany, gas has to contend with the EEG’s feed-in right for householders and EU competition law, which together create a pretty robust guarantee of competition in electricity supply – and take control away from the government. The PPA boom will grow, as more consumer-facing companies do the sums and find that a green energy supply does not cost their shareholders anything and is increasingly valuable for reputation. City mayors are likewise finding that green energy policies impose few financial or political costs, until it comes to restricting ICE vehicles (which has no impact on gas). So heating will switch from gas to heat pumps.