BERN - The popular initiative For Solar Installations Without Permits has failed, the Federal Chancellery announced in the Federal Gazette on Friday. The 18-month collection period expired on Thursday, 8 October, without the 100,000 valid signatures needed to force a national vote.
The outcome stings because of how close the raw figures looked. The committee's website claimed that 117,500 people had signed. Verification of the lists in July and August, however, struck out nearly 20,000 entries as invalid, said Roland Weiss, one of the organisers. "Our legal counsel is currently investigating the circumstances," Weiss told the Keystone-SDA news agency, including how such a high failure rate was possible despite the use of professional signature-collection firms.
What the text wanted
The initiative asked voters to add a constitutional article making solar installations on buildings and structures exempt from building permits, inside and outside protected historic districts and landscapes. Exceptions would have remained for cultural monuments of national or cantonal significance and for listed historic sites, where a conditional permit could still have been required. Heritage and townscape commissions, which today block a share of rooftop projects, would have lost their say.
The failure leaves the permit regime where it is: with the cantons and the communes, and with the same local arguments about roofs in protected villages. It also leaves parliament's slower energy files, from grid investment to the building retrofits tracked in our heat-pump report, as the main road for solar expansion this winter.
Another solar text is still alive
Voters have not heard the last of the subject. A separate Green-backed solar initiative, For a Secure Supply With Renewable Energies, was formally validated earlier this year with 106,499 valid signatures and still awaits its place in the parliamentary calendar. The text that died on Thursday was a rival deregulation draft, not the Green one. How Switzerland treats ambitious energy texts at the ballot box is a theme we followed in the nuclear policy debate and the 2035 climate framework.