Former SP President Peter Bodenmann has been writing about solar fields in the Alps for years. Now a Valais community is bringing a gigantic facility that he designed to the citizens.
He is planning a gigantic solar field in Valais: Peter Bodenmann, former SP President, now hotelier and columnist in Brig.
Peter Bodenmann likes to make the big small. It’s his favorite form of provocation. When Federal Councilor Simonetta Sommaruga talks about electricity, Bodenmann hears “only empty formulas”. When the power gap grows to a monster, Bodenmann calls it a “Sunday walk”.
50,000,000,000 kilowatt hours will be missing by the middle of the century, says the head of Switzerland’s largest electricity company. The main problem is in winter when the Central Plateau is under the fog. The gap is eleven digits long, so it’s really long, but Bodenmann shrinks it down to 1 percent.
Bodenmann, the former President of the Social Democratic Party and today’s hotelier and columnist in Brig, claims that 1 percent of the Swiss alpine area can plug the power shortage in winter. For what feels like an eternity he has been annoying his readers with his solution for winter electricity: solar systems in the Alps, Fields of so-called “bifacial” systems that convert the sun into electricity not just on one side, but on two.
Bodenmann and the bifacials, for a long time reminded one of an angler with a bait that was too big, everyone looked at him, but nobody bit. Now a Valais municipality is bringing a solar field designed by Bodenmann to the public. An old school friend of Bodenmann’s provides an alpine height for a second field. The energy group Alpiq wants to invest.
As far as Valais is concerned, the two largest solar systems in Switzerland would be there. It sounds like a winter fairy tale, quite fantastic, and Red Anneliese plays a leading role.
The sunny future
The Rote Anneliese is Bodenmann’s leftist combat newspaper, founded in 1973 by the few leftists that the Upper Valais had at the time. The magazine had almost become an archival item, with a single issue appearing last year. Then Bodenmann placed a long article in February. In it, he promised a sunny future for the Upper Valais municipality of Grengiols.
“Make Grengiols Great Again” was the title with which Bodenmann is now getting bigger again.
His plan: place bifacial solar fields on the steep southern slopes of the community. The field would cover five square kilometers, the equivalent of 700 soccer fields. It would be gigantic by Swiss standards.
According to Bodenmann’s calculations, the solar field would supply two terawatt hours of electricity per year, half of which in winter. This corresponds to the energy that Switzerland’s largest hydroelectric power plant produces in a year.
This is roughly how Bodenmann calculated the plans for the mayor of Grengiols. He also calculated how much the community could earn from the system, 40,000 francs per inhabitant and year. Now the mayor of Grengiols, Armin Zeiter, says: “The idea is sensational.”
He is a hunter, he knows the area. “It’s so high that there’s never fog. Nothing.”
Last week, Zeiter announced the plans via the “Walliser Bote”. The municipal council is behind the idea and will inform the population at a meeting in June. The plans will be presented “and maybe then you’ll ask who is in favor and who is against,” says Armin Zeiter.
He thinks most will be in favour. “At the present time.”
There are critical voices, yes. You have to look more closely at the extent of the solar field, the spatial planning and everything. ‘But we have the sun. We should harvest them. And then the sun can’t threaten, it turns off the tap like Putin.”
“Almost like the Sahara”
Peter Bodenmann turned 70 in March, not the least bit mild and as know-it-all as in the best of times. He now sees it “as an intelligence test: How long will it take for politicians and the media to realize that winter electricity is not a problem thanks to the Alps?”
In his column in the “Weltwoche”, Bodenmann keeps listing who is failing in Swiss energy policy. (All except him.) He has written so much on bifacial systems that readers now write of “Bodenmannian solar systems”, others call him “Peter bifacial”.
Bodenmann bases his calculations on experiments carried out by energy researchers on an alp above Davos. There, bifacial systems deliver four times as much winter electricity per area as a photovoltaic system in the lowlands. The radiation is more intense at higher altitudes, and it is also reflected by the snow. It lacks fog and air pollution, which reduce performance in the lowlands.
You can imagine it like skiing: if you don’t apply sunscreen in the Valais sun, you’ll burn your face. But down in the Mittelland, very few people need protection on the same day.
In Bodenmann’s calculation, Switzerland needs 20 alpine solar fields the size of Grengiols in order to fill the winter power shortage. Landscape conservationists see a gigantic amount of distorted nature in it, Peter Bodenmann sees “Alpengold”. It is also a question of gray energy, he says: “It is ecologically insane to set up four times as many panels for the same amount of electricity.”
The energy group Alpiq takes a similar view. He is planning a solar field near the border with Italy, above the village of Gondo. “Gondosolar” is to produce electricity on an area the size of 14 soccer fields, on a meadow that belongs to an old school friend of Bodenmann’s. “Make Gondo Great Again,” says Peter Bodenmann. And he could think of many more mountain villages that might want to grow. Also in Uri, Graubünden or the Bernese Alps.
This is what the solar field could look like if Gondo.
Switzerland has the best prerequisites for the energy transition. “We in Valais are almost as good as the Sahara.”
For a long time, Bodenmann was exotic in this position. Now influential central politicians are also promoting solar fields in Valais.
Do we want that?
The Valais Council of States Beat Rieder considers large-scale plants to be a “huge opportunity”. His intimate Philipp Matthias Bregy, leader of the parliamentary group in Bern, asked the Federal Council whether it “would be prepared to remove existing spatial planning obstacles”.
The Valais Parliament commissioned the government to evaluate locations for solar fields and include them in the utilization plan. Only the Greens voted against it. They organize the resistance with environmental organizations and landscape protection.
Before the Alps are “paved over” with solar, the roofs should be equipped, they say. You have to cover highways and parking lots, mount panels on dam walls and let them float on reservoirs. “There is currently a huge construction boom in Valais,” says Eva-Maria Kläy from Upper Valais Pro Natura. “We would like the built-up area to be used to the full first.”
“We” are Pro Natura, WWF and the Landscape Conservation Foundation, which (to the dismay of the Valaisans) operates from Bern. Eva-Maria Kläy sits on site and sees herself as a realist. It has an official position but little dogma. She has a great sense of consensus but many questions about the projects at hand.
What is your experience with solar parks in France or Morocco? How much do the parks cost to maintain? Are the geological foundations in the Grengiols area given? Is terracing necessary because the slope is unstable? What if there are debris flows or avalanches? And if it really wasn’t possible without solar in the open spaces, what would be better: a single, gigantic system? Or several small ones?
“You can’t just say no from the office table,” says Kläy. She is now trying to talk to the initiates.
First of all, solar panels are needed on dam walls and on the lakes, say environmental groups and landscape conservationists.
The gigantic project in Grengiols considers the Pro Natura woman Kläy to be “half-baked”. It will cost a lot more than estimated. It demands an “official framework” from the canton. That this is “correctly laid out in terms of spatial planning and the standard plan”.
At Kläy, what tears the left apart in the energy transition comes together: Do you do climate protection or landscape protection? What happens when in doubt?
Peter Bodenmann says: “Climate protection is landscape protection. If we don’t protect the climate, the glaciers will disappear.
Eva Maria Kläy says: “Maybe we just have to vote. That we as a society ask ourselves: do we want that?”
The roofs are not enough
If you believe Jürg Rohrer, lecturer in renewable energies at the ZHAW, society basically has no choice.
On behalf of the Federal Office of Energy, Rohrer recently recalculated the potential of solar energy. He came up with 50 terawatt hours per year, which exceeds the expansion scenarios of the federal government. But in order to exploit the potential, a system would have to be installed in 90 to 95 percent of the buildings. Actually on all of them.
“If half of the homeowners install panels, and that’s optimistic, that would result in 25 terawatt hours a year,” Rohrer calculates. However, because very few use the full potential on the roof, the value is halved. That leaves 12 to 13 terawatt hours, which the roofs of Switzerland would then supply. This corresponds to about a third of the solar energy that the federal government expects in the energy perspectives.
Rohrer therefore says: “It won’t work without solar systems in the open spaces. With panels on ski lifts or reservoir walls, we never get the space we need.” He thinks bifacial systems on agricultural land are a good idea, even in the Alps. “But whether all of the winter electricity really has to come from alpine solar systems is another question. A combination with wind would be ideal.”
The Melee
Peter Bodenmann had already cast the columnist bait on wind energy. Had extrapolated yields and berated politicians for not realizing the potential. Now his canton of Valais is “ufgigumpt” when it comes to solar systems. For Bodenmann, the question is no longer whether the systems will come, but: What does the municipality get from the profit? What the canton? How do you ensure that the money stays in Valais?
He’s now on a green issue, but as a social democrat. In the end it’s all about the distribution.
There is still a long way to go before the money comes along that can be distributed. Switzerland’s top homeland protector, National Councilor Heidi Zgraggen, wants to temporarily ban the construction of solar fields. Until a national law regulates what can be written where and how.
Bodenmann violently attacks Zgraggen in columns. He now sees himself in the “infight” phase and fights with what his rules of provocation offer him: he makes the opponent’s problems smaller than they are. And herself and the bifacials a bit bigger.