Last week I found myself in a conversation with an airline representative and on the same evening with one of our SPIN members about a frustration that keeps surfacing: how hard it has become to get a genuinely big idea off the ground. Not because the ideas are weak, but because everyone — including public authorities — now asks the same question before committing to anything. What is the business case?

On the face of it, that is a reasonable question. Follow it to its logical conclusion, though, and you arrive somewhere uncomfortable. If a narrow business case had always been the deciding test, some of humanity’s greatest achievements would never have happened. The Apollo programme would have been grounded before it left the drawing board as much as Switzerland’s electrification of its railways. The Gotthard tunnels — first the nineteenth-century rail tunnel, later the base tunnel — would have looked like an extravagant expense with no clear return. So would a great deal of the infrastructure we now take completely for granted.

The cost we never counted

For years, the climate debate carried the same blind spot. The conversation fixed almost entirely on the cost of acting — the investment needed to defossilise energy, transport and industry — while the cost of not acting stayed comfortably out of frame. That is finally changing, and the numbers are sobering.

A recent analysis in the Swiss Tages-Anzeiger pulled the figures together, and they are worth sitting with. Heat alone already costs Switzerland hundreds of millions of francs every year in lost productivity — researchers put it at CHF 600–700 million, a figure that could triple. Above 30 °C, every additional degree makes the workforce around three per cent less productive, and workplace accidents climb with it. Extreme weather — floods, droughts, storms, rockfalls — is adding roughly a billion francs a year in infrastructure costs. The Blatten rockfall alone, in which a warming climate played its part, destroyed some CHF 320 million in buildings and infrastructure. Measured per head, Switzerland already carries the second-highest weather-related damages in Europe.

And those are today’s numbers. Looking forward, the estimates keep climbing. Where the OECD once modelled a two per cent hit to global output, more recent work points far higher: Swiss Re has estimated an 11–14 per cent decline in global GDP, and economists Diego Känzig and Adrien Bilal suggest that a single additional degree of warming could cut global output by around 20 per cent in the long run — with Switzerland losing something on the order of 15 per cent, a five-figure franc amount for every person in the country.

The business case was there all along

This is where the conversation with our member turned. Look at those figures again and the “missing” business case is suddenly staring back at you. It was never absent — it was simply hidden in the costs we avoid rather than the revenue we book. At least for a society. Every tonne of fossil carbon we do not burn, every extreme-weather franc we never have to spend on repair, treatment or replacement, is a return on investment. The business case for defossilisation is the avoided follow-on cost to society.

Why this matters for Power-to-X

This is exactly why Power-to-X deserves to be treated as one of those big ideas — the kind a spreadsheet, left to its own devices, will always undervalue. Converting renewable, hard-to-store electricity into hydrogen, e-fuels and synthetic molecules built from renewable energy with recycled CO₂ is not a niche experiment. It is one of the few credible routes to defossilising the parts of our economy that electricity alone cannot reach: aviation, heavy industry, long-term energy storage. But also road traffic when it cannot be electrified for whatever reason; or only simply not fast enough. Judged only against next quarter’s balance sheet, it looks expensive. Judged against the tens of billions in damages we are otherwise quietly signing up for, it looks like precisely the investment a society ought to be making.

The Apollo programme, Switzerland’s electrification of its railways and the Gotthard tunnels were never really about a business case in the narrow sense. They were about a society deciding, together, that something was worth doing. The encouraging thing about these new climate numbers is that they may finally let the sceptics reach the same conclusion by a different route — because this time the business case really is there. We just have to be honest enough to count the costs we are trying to avoid.

Maybe, slowly, that realisation is beginning to dawn. It needs to. But will politics and administration act fast enough?

Power-to-X Congress Switzerland 2026

Power-to-X Congress Switzerland 2026

Join us at the Power-to-X Congress Switzerland 2026 on 22 September 2026, 10–18h, at the Kursaal Bern. Under the banner «Reality Check with Net Zero», the congress is co-organised by energie-cluster.ch and SPIN, in partnership with Réseau H2 Suisse Romande.