Switzerland’s fossil fuel fever strikes again
Swiss export credit agency supports a controversial new gas project in Poland
At COP30, which is currently taking place in Belém/Brazil, the Swiss government is supporting the “tripling of renewable energy by 2030, as well as a global phase-out of coal, oil, and gas by 2050”. As it has done before, Switzerland’s export credit agency SERV is undermining this position by supporting yet another new gas project.
As we reported three weeks ago, SERV has given preliminary or final approval to 10 gas power projects since 2023, in spite of the Swiss government’s commitment four years ago that it would end all such support after 2022.
On October 22, SERV indicated its intention to support the 372 MW Songon gas power plant in Côte d’Ivoire. Two weeks later, a senior representative of Calik Enerji, a Turkish construction company, announced on LinkedIn that his company had secured a SERV guarantee for building the Kozienice power plant, a massive, 1’336 MW gas project in Poland. SERV has meanwhile confirmed this information.
Poland is the most coal-dependent country of the EU. Calik Enerji argues that “the Kozienice project will play a key role in Poland’s coal-to-gas transition, reducing national CO₂ emissions and preparing for future hydrogen integration”. This argument is spurious for two reasons:
First, Poland imports gas mainly in liquefied form, and the greenhouse gas emissions released during the extraction, processing, transportation and storage of LNG are so high that its climate impacts can be even bigger than the impacts of coal. SERV assessed the climate impacts of the Kozienice project, but refuses to disclose its assessment to the public.
Maybe more importantly, Poland is rapidly moving away from coal indeed – but primarily towards renewables, not fossil gas. In the past 10 years, the capacity of gas power plants in Poland increased by 4.2 GW, while the country’s renewable capacity increased by 26.8 GW. Coal still generated 56% of Poland’s electricity in 2024, while renewable sources generated 29% and gas, 12%. Yet growing quickly, Poland’s renewable energy sources in June 2025 for the first time generated more electricity than coal.
In Poland, electric utilities can bid for subsidized power supply contracts in so called capacity market auctions, and gas projects would not be viable without such subsidies. Because solar power combined with battery storage is cheaper than gas power, ENEA, the utility developing the Kozienice project, for years failed to place a power supply contract and attract a developer for the power plant.
ENEA only managed to secure a power supply contract once the government, which prefers dealing with large fossil fuel utilities rather than with decentralized renewable producers, excluded battery storage from competing for the contracts. Kozienice will saddle a country moving towards renewables with expensive, unnecessary and dirty gas power for decades.
In July 2025, ENEA finally signed a contract with Calik Enerji to develop the new gas power plant through direct negotiations rather than a public tender. Such no-tender contracts may open the door to corruption and are discouraged by the Swiss authorities. SERV requires its customers to sign an anti-corruption declaration, but does not require public tender processes.
While most other export credit agencies are moving away from fossil fuels, Switzerland’s SERV is positioning itself as the European go-to source of export finance for gas projects. This undermines the transition to renewable energy sources in countries like Poland as well as the credibility of Swiss foreign and climate policies.
SERV is hoping that the law governing it will be revised, and the Swiss government has announced such a revision for next year. SERV hopes that this revision will allow it to operate more flexibly, and will “improve the access of Swiss exporters to large international projects”. Through its all-out support for fossil gas projects SERV risks destroying the broad political support it will need for this revision to move forward.
Image: existing coal power plant at Kozienice