Solar development strategy for the Port of Switzerland

The challenge

The Port of Switzerland in Basel — Switzerland’s only commercial port — is committed to a sustainable infrastructure for the region. Together with utility IWB, logistics operators Rhenus Alpina and Ultra-Brag, the port launched the Port Innovation Laboratory to help Basel reach its net-zero target by 2037 in a real industrial test bed. As part of the development plan, Rhenus Alpina was considering installing a third PV plant on the port site — a move that would create more than 6 GWh of potential overproduction, and the consortium wanted to know whether that surplus could be turned into additional revenue or whether something else made more sense.

The site is hard to plan because three things move at once. Spatial complexity: high-impact options like creating an electricity-sharing community require modelling the location of every building that would be connected. Resource availability: intermittent solar generation has to be matched against very different on-site loads, including cranes and buildings. And volatility: the energy market shifts often enough that the analysis had to span several scenarios with different power costs and renewable-export prices. Spreadsheet methods are too coarse for an integrated plan; full simulation tools would have demanded technology decisions the consortium hadn’t yet made.

How Sympheny was used

IWB and the Sympheny team ran the project as four sequential steps: status-quo analysis, goal-setting, scenario modelling, and presentation of the optimal strategies. Four strategies were defined, each building on the previous one: status quo, max on-site production, interlinking of buildings, and max self-consumption with batteries. Each strategy was optimised against four scenarios — stabilisation of energy markets, sustained high prices, excess energy, and unstable supply — for a total of 16 variants.

• Strategy-and-scenario matrix — Sixteen variants — four strategies stress-tested against four energy-market scenarios — produced a single decision matrix showing the cost, investment and risk profile of each option.
• Risk and opportunity dashboard — Variable operating costs, additional total investment, total costs and delta-vs-status-quo presented per variant in one view, so chances and risks could be compared quickly.
• Sensitivity to feed-in tariff — Tested how the economics of every strategy shift if the feed-in tariff is replaced by spot-market revenue alone — surfacing regulatory change as the dominant risk.

Result

All four strategies (other than the status quo) deliver cost savings versus today’s operation, up to roughly 20–25%. The full 6,000 kWp PV potential is largely exploited in every strategy except the status quo. Without interlinking the buildings, only 10% of generated electricity is consumed directly on site; in the strategies that include batteries (max self-consumption), the batteries are sized to cover roughly 2–4% of total electricity demand.

The most important finding is that regulatory change is the dominant risk, not market price volatility. The feed-in tariff assumption has the biggest single impact on PV economics — if only the spot electricity price counted as revenue, PV expansion would be capped at 1,900 kWp, and pure max-self-consumption would actually be more expensive than the status quo. Interlinking the buildings is the strategy that protects the port against a negative tariff change, and the analysis identifies the buildings that should be connected first versus those that only join in some scenarios. The port now has a defensible staged plan and an open question — whether to extend the electricity community to neighbouring port operators — that future studies can answer.

The 4 × 4 strategy-and-scenario matrix calculated in Sympheny. Every strategy beyond the status quo cuts total cost, with savings up to 20–25%.