RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN SWITZERLAND AND THE EUROPEAN UNION
28 August 2026 – Universitร della Svizzera italiana, Lugano, Switzerland
The 2026 Annual Meeting of the Swiss Energy Law Association (SELA), organised in cooperation with the Center for Law and Sustainability at the University of Lucerne, brought academics, regulators, practitioners and energy-sector representatives to USI’s East Campus in Lugano on 28 August.
Werner Luginbรผhl, President of the Swiss Federal Electricity Commission (ElCom), opened the substantive programme with a keynote on the fundamentals of the Swiss electricity system and the importance of a Swiss-EU electricity agreement. From there, the meeting moved across a deliberately broad set of questions: climate litigation, nuclear policy, battery storage, gas security and Switzerland’s place in the European electricity market.
What connected these otherwise different subjects was a practical concern that surfaced repeatedly over the course of the day. The energy transition is no longer simply a matter of fixing a decarbonisation target and identifying the technology that can deliver it. Reliability, infrastructure, market design, legal competence and investment increasingly have to be considered together, often within the same regulatory or contractual problem.
WELCOME REMARKS
Opening Remarks
Professor Ilaria Espa of the Universitร della Svizzera italiana (USI), Lugano, Secretary-General of SELA and organiser of the Annual Meeting, welcomed around 50 participants to the University’s new premises in Lugano. Together with her team, she thanked those present for taking part and for their continued engagement with SELA’s work.
Professor Thomas Cottier of the University of Bern, President of SELA, began by questioning the usefulness of some of the divisions through which energy lawyers habitually organise their work. Public law, private law, commercial law, European law and international law remain distinct fields, he noted, but the problems generated by the energy transition rarely respect those boundaries.
A climate claim may start with ordinary tort doctrine and quickly engage human-rights law; access to an electricity network may turn on regulation, market design and contract at once. Cottier did not suggest that established legal categories had lost their value. His point was rather that they no longer provide self-contained explanations of the underlying problems. He also welcomed the strong in-person attendance, encouraging participants to make use of the informal exchanges that tend to disappear in online formats.
Professor Sebastian Heselhaus of the University of Lucerne, Director of the Center for Law and Sustainability, placed the same issue in a broader political setting. Climate regulation is meeting stronger resistance just as energy security has returned to the centre of public debate. For Heselhaus, these developments should not be treated as separate pressures. They instead sharpen the question of what a sustainable energy policy must be capable of delivering in practice. Cost, reliability and implementation are therefore not external objections to sustainability; increasingly, they are among the conditions on which climate policy depends for its political and legal credibility.
PANEL I
Climate Litigation and the Energy Transition
Dr Andreas Hรถsli (Kellerhals Carrard), Dr Gabriel Webber Ziero (Swiss Re), Johannes Wendland (HEKS/EPER) and Professor Angus Johnston (University of Oxford) approached climate litigation from private-law, corporate, comparative and regulatory perspectives.
Much of the discussion turned on Asmania et al. v Holcim AG. Four residents of the Indonesian island of Pari are seeking emissions reductions and compensation for alleged climate-related harm under Article 28 et seq. of the Swiss Civil Code. The case remains at the procedural stage. The Cantonal Court of Zug allowed the action to proceed, rejecting the proposition that climate policy necessarily falls outside the competence of civil courts and that the claim should be treated as an actio popularis. None of the more difficult merits questions has yet been resolved: causation, damage and the attribution of a legally relevant share of responsibility all remain open. Precisely for that reason, the proceedings offer a useful illustration of how familiar private-law concepts are being tested by cumulative, geographically dispersed and transnational forms of harm.
A different difficulty arises from the regulatory environment in which multinational companies operate. ESG commitments encouraged or required in one jurisdiction may attract antitrust, fiduciary-duty or consumer-law scrutiny in another. The resulting legal exposure makes consistency between public statements, governance arrangements and internal implementation increasingly important. The wider litigation landscape, including Milieudefensie v Shell and Lliuya v RWE, points to the same underlying problem: recognising climate harm in the abstract is only one step. Courts and regulators must still translate global objectives into company-specific duties and into rules of attribution that can operate within existing legal frameworks.
The exchange repeatedly came back to ordinary legal reasoning rather than to a wholly new body of climate law. Individual loss, causation and responsibility remain central even when the factual setting is global. Yet the hierarchy of norms and the timing of intervention can alter the legal analysis considerably. Climate objectives with constitutional or EU-law force may constrain regulatory choices differently from discretionary mandates; similarly, consultation and regulatory design may offer a more effective point of intervention than judicial review once a measure has already been adopted.
KEYNOTE ADDRESS
Swiss Electricity Security and the European Dimension
Werner Luginbรผhl then shifted attention from litigation to the physical operation of the electricity system. Switzerland consumes roughly 60 TWh of electricity each year, but the annual total masks a marked seasonal imbalance. Summer production commonly leaves a surplus, whereas winter brings a need for imports. In winter 2025/26 those imports reached almost 7 TWh, partly because the Gรถsgen nuclear power plant was unavailable.
For Luginbรผhl, that seasonal pattern is the reason annual self-sufficiency can be a misleading measure of security of supply. What matters is not only the volume produced over twelve months, but whether enough energy and capacity are available when the system is under the greatest strain.
His assessment of renewable expansion was similarly nuanced. Rooftop solar has grown quickly, adding roughly 5 TWh over five years, while progress elsewhere has been slower. Alpine photovoltaic projects have faced questions of profitability and local acceptance; hydropower remains procedurally demanding; wind development continues at a modest pace. Luginbรผhl referred, with some humour, to the succession of federal ‘Express’ measures designed to accelerate energy infrastructure. The underlying point was less light-hearted: legislation can shorten procedures more readily than it can solve the financing, authorisation and construction challenges of major infrastructure.
Storage raises a different set of questions. Batteries can shift photovoltaic production over several hours, respond rapidly to price signals and provide short-term balancing services, and Luginbรผhl therefore regarded them as an important part of the future system. Their limits are equally important, however. They do not replace seasonal storage, while Swiss reservoirs operate on an entirely different scale. A system with a larger share of variable generation will still need dispatchable capacity and reserves. Treating all forms of storage as a single regulatory category can consequently obscure the fact that they perform very different functions.
The European dimension occupied a substantial part of the keynote because Switzerland is physically embedded in the continental electricity network even though it has remained outside important European market-coupling and regulatory processes. The result is an increasingly uncomfortable asymmetry: Swiss operators are affected by rules and coordination mechanisms over which Switzerland has limited influence. Luginbรผhl therefore presented an electricity agreement with the European Union as both an economic and an institutional issue. In his account, an agreement would strengthen import possibilities, access to balancing platforms, regulatory information and participation in the structures through which cross-border electricity is already managed. Cottier picked up the institutional point in the discussion, observing that integration also means being represented where relevant decisions are taken. For a country at the centre of the European grid, resilience cannot be reduced to national self-sufficiency.
PANEL II
Nuclear Energy and the Future of Swiss Energy Policy
Dr Kateryna Holzer (University of Eastern Finland and SELA), Pascal Hachem (Bรคr & Karrer), Dr Kim Fyhr (University of Eastern Finland) and Lukas Mรผhle (GW Innovations GmbH) examined nuclear energy through the lenses of legal policy, investment, waste management, technology and security of supply.
The starting point was political as much as legal: the different responses to Chernobyl and Fukushima provided the background to a discussion of the Swiss framework. Existing Swiss reactors have no fixed statutory closure date. Their licences are open-ended, and continued operation depends on compliance with safety requirements under ENSI supervision. The present prohibition concerns new general licences for new nuclear power plants. That distinction becomes more consequential as expected operating lives lengthen and existing plants are increasingly discussed as a bridge while replacement capacity develops.
Finland offered a useful contrast: there, nuclear generation and renewables have expanded alongside one another, while the Mankala model shows how industrial and utility shareholders can share generation costs. Even so, political acceptance and a supportive legal framework do not eliminate the financing difficulties associated with new nuclear construction. The Olkiluoto repository illustrated another feature of the sector: its extraordinary time horizon. Developed over decades, with sustained local engagement and an effective municipal veto, it showed how deeply questions of nuclear policy can depend on long-term institutional and local consent.
Finally, small modular reactors may gain advantages from standardisation and factory production; fusion, by contrast, continues to make scientific progress without yet resolving the engineering challenge of commercial electricity generation. The discussion of cost overruns in large projects also resisted a purely technological explanation. Design maturity, specialised suppliers, contracting structures and project management all matter. Nuclear fuel itself is comparatively easy to stock, but dependencies remain in fabrication and specialised components, another reason why Swiss energy security cannot be assessed in isolation from the wider European system.
PANEL III
Battery Storage, Flexibility and Energy Infrastructure
Dr Moritz Wรผstenberg (Streamtech Solutions AG and SELA), Louise Kavacs (50Hertz), Dr Rolf Endriss (AEM Massagno) and Riccardo Albieri (DXT Commodities) focused on the regulatory and contractual problems created by battery storage.
Batteries sit uneasily within legal categories built around a clearer division between producers and consumers and single installation can draw electricity from the grid, inject it again, provide balancing services and react almost immediately to market prices. The difficulty becomes especially visible where connection capacity is scarce. German experience suggests that a strict first-come, first-served model may tie up valuable capacity in projects that are not sufficiently mature, prompting a move towards a ‘first ready, first served’ approach. Grid-connection law then does more than regulate technical access: in practice, it also allocates a scarce economic resource.
Connection is only the first part of the problem because once batteries are operating, price signals and local network needs may pull in opposite directions: many units may charge or discharge at the same time because the market rewards that behaviour, even where the local grid would benefit from the reverse. Swiss regulation is beginning to respond by limiting the extent to which reinforcement costs can be socialised and by treating flexibility as an asset that generally remains with the owner but can be contracted by the network operator. Used in that way, flexibility may postpone or even avoid some physical grid reinforcement.
These network questions feed directly into contract design: a BESS optimisation agreement has to allocate not only price and output risk, but also practical control over charging, discharging and availability. Dispatch rights, degradation, network constraints, lost availability and changes in market rules can therefore become central bargaining points. The commercial value of storage, as the speakers emphasised, depends not simply on the battery technology itself but on who is legally entitled to use its flexibility, when, and on what terms.
PANEL IV
Security of Gas Supply
Professor Thomas Cottier moderated the final panel with Professor Kim Talus (University of Eastern Finland and University of Helsinki), Brigitta Kratz (Kratz Legal) and Matteo Quadranti (Quadranti & Molteni; Ticino Grand Council). Their discussion moved between the European, Swiss and cantonal dimensions of gas security.
The European experience after 2022 exposed weaknesses in a security model built largely around liberalised markets, diversification and emergency rules. Physical availability was only one part of the crisis; affordability and the ability of states to act in solidarity under simultaneous pressure proved equally important. This led to a distinction between security of supply and resilience. The former asks whether the commodity can be obtained. The latter reaches further, taking account of concentrated supply chains, control over strategic inputs and the capacity of the system to keep functioning when ordinary market assumptions fail. On that view, diversification may carry an additional cost and require public intervention rather than amounting merely to a switch from one supplier to another.
Switzerland is particularly exposed because it produces no natural gas, has no large-scale seasonal storage and does not automatically benefit from EU solidarity arrangements. During the 2022 crisis, this made a combination of federal measures, industry coordination and cross-border solutions necessary. The discussion also underlined how closely gas and electricity security are linked: reserve power plants depend significantly on gas or dual-fuel capability, but they can support the electricity system only if the required fuel is itself available at the moment of stress.
Ticino brought the longer-term infrastructure dilemma into sharper focus since the canton has historically received gas through Italy, while its energy and climate policy foresees a substantial reduction in fossil-gas use. Networks may therefore still need investment to remain reliable at the very moment when their traditional role is expected to decline. Some infrastructure could later be adapted for renewable gases, synthetic methane, hydrogen or other Power-to-X products, but the timing of those choices is delicate. Overinvestment risks locking in assets and uses that policy is seeking to phase down; withdrawing too early could strand infrastructure that might still perform a useful transitional function.
Electrification offers one route away from fossil gas, but it does not make the underlying security problem disappear. It shifts part of the burden onto winter electricity supply, storage and grid capacity. The session nevertheless ended with a clear recommendation to progressively move away from gas and replace it with electricity where the electricity system can accommodate the additional demand.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
Cottier’s closing remarks did not try to compress the day into a single message. Instead, he returned to the points on which uncertainty remains. Climate litigation is moving towards a more recognisable debate about duties to act, but causation, damage and the proper space for political choice are still difficult. On electricity, his position was more definite: he reiterated that an agreement with the European Union is indispensable to Swiss security of supply.
Other sessions pointed to different forms of interdependence. Finland’s experience with nuclear power raised questions about technology neutrality, public acceptance and the consequences of longer operating lives. The battery discussion, meanwhile, showed how closely network physics, market incentives and contractual design have become connected. On gas, Cottier returned to the need to reduce structural dependency where possible, particularly through electrification when the electricity system can absorb the additional load.
Heselhaus closed the circle by returning to the interdisciplinary theme of the opening remarks. None of the issues discussed during the meeting could be understood fully from within a single field of law. Tort doctrine now interacts with human-rights law and climate policy; new technologies produce regulatory and contractual questions at the same time; infrastructure choices cannot be separated from market design or security of supply. Espa added a geographical dimension. Swiss energy law may be exercised through national and cantonal competences, but it operates inside European networks and global supply chains.
Seen together, the sessions made clear that security, resilience and sustainability cannot easily be arranged according to a fixed hierarchy, since measures designed to strengthen one objective may create new pressures elsewhere: greater resilience may come at a higher cost, faster decarbonisation may place additional strain on networks, and infrastructure developed for one stage of the transition may later need to be adapted to a different role. Rather than temporary inconsistencies that will disappear once the right technologies have been identified, these tensions are likely to remain an inherent feature of the energy transition itself.
The legal challenge is therefore to manage this process of continuing adjustment by providing a framework that is sufficiently stable to support investment, coordination and long-term planning, while remaining flexible enough to respond to changes in technology, markets and the physical energy system. It was this need to reconcile stability with adaptation, more than any individual technology, dispute or regulatory question, that ultimately connected the different discussions throughout the meeting.
Links for the materials:
Rolf Endriss – AEM Presentation
Dr. Hachem – Nuclear Energy in Switzerland
Hoesli, Asmania et al. – Presentation
Johannes Wendland – Climate Litigation
Louise Sophia Kavacs – Beyond Grid Connection: Integrating BESS into Germany’s Power System
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