Scrapbook for September

01.09.2025 – Poor little Switzerland – EU plays hardball

Another Swiss environmental fantasy bites the dust.

As this website has noted on numerous occasions, plucky little Switzerland can expect no mercy from the EU. The EU giveth nothing, it only taketh away. Switzerland is a little blip of a country (pop. 9 million) totally surrounded by the EU (pop. 450 million).

The latest punishment beating from Brussels comes in the 'Electricity Agreement Switzerland – EU', the details of which are only now becoming widely known. This Agreement is important to sustain the green fever-dream of the Swiss by providing regulated access to the electricity production in the EU over the various connectors when the Swiss home production fails to meet demand – as it frequently will.

Only last year, in a Swiss referendum on the proposed 'Federal Electricity Supply Act', 69 percent of voters in an act of brainless self-harm agreed to an insanely green package of measures. Amongst these was a bung for house owners: stick some solar panels on your house and the energy companies will pay you a fixed price for your electricity that goes into the grid of 0.06 CHF per kWh, irrespective of the current market price.

It only takes a moment's thought to see this measure as lunacy. In the year since that referendum the houses in my village have been plastered with solar panels. Even houses which already have solar panels have been given more. Gone are the terracotta roof tiles or stone slates of old, plastic rectangles are the new look; even rustic balconies and walls have been encased.

On sunny summer days, around noon, when you don't need the electricity yourself, the state pays you good money for whatever you can produce (which it doesn't really need either). Added to the grants and subsidies for the installation, that is money for nothing and kilowatt-hours for free.

Without the fixed price guarantee, solar panels on private houses would be a loss-making project. In summer around noon the market price would be close to zero. Which is exactly what the EU demands as part of the Electricity Agreement, an end to fixed pricing. Which puts me, as a fan of free-markets, into the painful position of having to agree with the EU on something.

Now that the EU has got plucky little Switzerland down on the ground, along comes an extra kicking. It demands the removal of the designation 'inland' for electricity generated in Switerland. Simple people like me would think 'so what? What's in a name?'

But the use of the term 'inland' would have allowed the electricity distributors to offer an option for patriotic consumers to choose supply contracts which specified only electricity produced in Switzerland. There are a surprising number of well-heeled Swiss people who will choose the 'good' option, however much more expensive it is. Such market rigging in the pursuit of some 'noble lie' has been the norm in Switzerland, for so long, in fact, that Swiss politicians no longer blush when they do it.

Take away the 'inland' option and the distributors are free to go shopping for electricity wherever they want – to the benefit of consumers, particularly those who are not house owners participating in the scam. Switzerland's puny solar installations cannot compete with the panels soaking up the sun around the Mediterranean, the French nuclear power stations, the Germans burning Russian gas and Braunkohle (lignite).

In effect, the EU has exposed the lefty green market manipulation for what it is and will, quite rightly, have none of it. The only trouble for the Swiss government is that all this manipulation has been undertaken to fulfill the results of a referendum. The Swiss government is now constitutionally obliged to obey the wishes of the citizens as expressed in that vote. Something's got to give.