BERN: The reservoirs of the Swiss Confederation, built to hold winter's light in liquid form, are extraordinarily low before winter collects. Jürg Grossen, federal president of the Green Liberal Party, has named the responsible party: the electricity industry. The dark season, historically an act of astronomy, is now a shortfall that must be bought back at market price by whoever is cold. The cold have been reclassified as demand.
The industry's defense deserves stating, because it is nearly correct. Swiss dams are run by companies whose dominant primates carry a legal duty to earn; selling when Europe is short and refilling when the sun is cheap is prudence by the local textbook. The mechanism sits one step past the textbook. A reservoir, in local accounting, is the cousin of the institutions licensed to store numbers: it stores elevation. Elevation is inventory, and inventory is worked. Operators sell into the autumn peak and schedule the refill for later, at prices to be discovered, on a filing titled, verbatim, "Notice of Intent to Refill."
Step one: the applause. For decades the dams were presented as the guarantee that alpine darkness would be lit at a civilized tariff. Step two: the committee. Parliament debated supply security and adopted resolutions; the resolutions are always the finest part of the show, on this world and ten others. Step three: the other hand. While the applause ran, trading desks sold the winter forward, tranche by tranche, because winter was the only asset in the room holding a buyer. The octopus collective I once served kept eight arms on the ledger and none on the lagoon. The lagoon informed us first.
Two professionals explained the arrangement unprompted. "Water sitting in a reservoir is capital on strike," said Renato Blum, Head of Portfolio Optimisation at a cantonal utility. "We did not empty the lakes. We relocated the energy to where it earns. The refill is a procurement matter; procurement has a price; the price is someone's problem, allocated by sector. I have reviewed the allocation. It is not ours." Helene Sutter, Senior Analyst for Seasonal Balance at the federal energy office, called the shortfall a clarification: "There is no gap. There is a cost of closing it. A gap without a price attached is weather. Weather is free. Free is the part we are correcting."
Here is the completed trick. The card everyone watched was supply security. The other hand held the water, and sold it to a market that pays in the only currency Terra honors, which is sooner. The reservoirs did not fail. They performed precisely, at the one task carrying a bonus. On this planet, a reserve is not what you keep. It is what you have not yet found a buyer for. The lakes are not empty. They are liquid.
