The Long-Term Impact of the Electorate on the Swiss Electricity Market Transition

The Swiss government, through its Energy Strategy 2050, is engaged on a path to transition Switzerland to become a carbon-neutral country by the year 2050. In this chapter, we look at the impact that the electorate can have on this transition and on the Swiss electricity market. This is done using hybrid agent-based modelling. We model the Swiss electricity market and we add to this a model of the policy-making process. This allows us to study which policy instruments are more likely to be implemented depending on the Swiss electricity market progression and on the policy actors’ interests. The results have shown that the electorate has a limited impact on the policy chosen and on the electricity market. Overall, an environmentally conscious electorate leads policy actors to select the carbon tax as a policy more often. This, however, has the adverse effect to increase the electricity price and increase import dependency in winter. In high demand growth scenarios, the carbon tax policy is not sufficient to stem the construction of gas turbine power plants. We also show that because the electricity model does not consider an extended demand response option or technology advancement, the knowledge gained from this model is limited. This drives the behaviour of the model into scenarios which are unlikely to happen, such as a large increase of the gas turbine power plants. Overall, we conclude that, in their current form, even with an environmentally conscious electorate, the electricity market conditions do not allow Switzerland to reach its emissions targets.