Swiss Review / February 2022 / No.1 8 Focus Marmorera is legendary. It was only after several expropriation proceedings that this Grisons village situated on the Julier Pass was destroyed and flooded to make way for a dam of the same name. From as early as 1920, there were plans to flood the entire Urseren Valley in the canton of Uri and turn it into a dam. Prompted by power supply shortages, the project got up and running after the Second World War. But the valley community violently resisted, hastening the project’s eventual demise. “Nuclear subsidiaries in the Alps” But it is 1986 that is the key year in understanding why hydropower lost its aura. Back then, utility company Kraf twerke Nordwestschweiz scrapped its plan to turn the Greina plateau between Grisons and Ticino into a reservoir – after years of strong resistance from a coalition of conservationists and countryside campaigners on the one hand and local opposition on the other managed to bring this remote Alpine highland to the attention of national policymakers. Greina became a symbol of environmentalist objections to the hydropower industry’s practice of prioritisingprofits,whichhad led toadalliance with the contentious nuclear industry. The drill is as follows. Inexpensive, surplus nuclear energy during offpeak hours is used to pump water up into Switzerland’s reservoirs. Hydroelectric plant operators can then produce expensive electricity during peak hours and maximise their profits. Do profit-oriented “nuclear subsidiaries in the Alps”, as critics dub the hydropower plants, justify selling off the country’s last natural mountain and river landscapes? Limits to growth? Proponents and opponents of hydropower development have disagreed on this fundamental question for over 30 years. The Federal Supreme Court sometimes has to intervene, as in the case of the Grimsel Pass Dam, where attempts to raise the dam wall have been blocked until now. According to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), 95 per cent of Switzerland’s technically feasible hydropower potential is already being exploited. Although the federal government has imposed stricter environmental controls on residual water f lows, Switzerland has “long passed” the critical point. The WWF adds that 60 per cent of the country’s native fish and crab species have died out or are close to extinction. And yet hundreds of hydropower upgrades and newbuilds are still being planned, much of these small-scale. The biggest and therefore most hotly debated of these has been earmarked for the site of the recently shrunk Trift Glacier. Increased pressure on hydropower Since Greina, the picture has become evenmore complicated. There are two newchallenges. Firstly, climate change and glacial melt nowmean that water run-off mainly occurs more in the spring than in the summer. Secondly, Swiss policymakers ratcheted up the pressure on hydropower by deciding in the aftermath of the Fukushima reactor disaster to phase out nuclear power and replace it with renewable energy – as part of their commitment to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions. Is it at all possible to gain even more from hydropower, which currently accounts for just under 60 per cent of Swiss electricity production, Heavier than the Great Pyramid of Giza – the enormous Grande Dixence Dam is the highest building structure in Switzerland. Photo:Keystone
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