Innovative Swiss solar projects win Watt d’Or 2023 prizes

A Solskin solar panel demonstrator - one of the winner's of a 2023 Watt d'Or prize - is installed at the EMPA research institute in Dübendorf. Roman Keller (Zurich)

An autonomous solar energy project that powers a local community in sunny southern Switzerland is among the six winners of this year’s prestigious Watt d’Or energy prizes.

The “solar power district” in Lugaggia in canton Ticino, a three-year pilot project, was the winner of the Watt d’Or 2023External link in the energy technologies category.

Eighteen local apartment buildings and a kindergarten, fitted with solar panels, are connected to heat pumps, a 60 kWh community battery and smart network systems to generate and share most of the electricity used in the village north of Lugano. Around 94% of the solar-generated electricity that is not used directly is shared and consumed locally.

“It successfully demonstrated that an intelligently networked and controlled combination of electricity consumers and solar power producers can significantly increase self-sufficiency,” the energy office said in a statementExternal link on Thursday.

The other winners of this year’s Watt d’Or awards included Switzerland’s first industrial power-to-gas plant in Dietikon, which converts green energy into both hydrogen and methane. The plant can produce 450 cubic metres of hydrogen per hour, or up to 18,000 megawatt hours of synthetic renewable gas per year, which is fed into the local gas grid.

Awards also went to the solar panel firm 3S Swiss Solar Solutions in Gwatt near Thun for its aesthetic photovoltaic systems and Zurich Soft Robotics GmbH for its movable mosaic-like solar modules marketed under the name Solskin.

EVTEC, a company based at Kriens-Obernau, also won an award for its bidirectional charging station for electric vehicles, which is able to charge two vehicles simultaneously. The innovative device can also feed electricity from a vehicle’s batteries into a building to reduce consumption peaks or into the local power grid to compensate for energy fluctuations.

A special jury prize went to Refugees Go Solar+, a project initiated by the Bern non-governmental organisations Solafrica and Root & Branch to train asylum refugees to work in Switzerland’s solar energy sector. The project is supported by the trade association Swissolar, SwissEnergy, and the State Secretariat for Migration.

The Swiss solar industry is currently booming but desperately needs skilled workers. Many refugees would like to work but are prevented from doing so as they lack the professional qualification that is recognised in Switzerland.