National energy policy goals are known and monitored, but how is the progress of the Swiss energy transition on regional level?

Working on our challenges will contributing to the current, highly relevant discussion on security of energy supply in Switzerland. You will support us to develop cutting-edge energy policy design.

Challenge slides

Step 1: Web scraping energy policy goals

Find and gather information about energy policy goals and activities of municipalities. Identify ambitious and less ambitious municipalities Optional: Cluster municipalities that follow same/close goals and benchmark

Step 2: regionalize renewable energy production

How much production in Swiss municipalities? Data wrangling and fusion

🧑🏽‍🏫 GeoImpact/BfE Digital Office

Project Team

Who has which skills and is in which team - policy (P), data (D), scraping (S)


• Emilie Boillat
• Guiseppe Caponetto
• Peter Janes («Piet»)
• Baptiste Jordan
• Manuel Meyer
• Lukas Oberholzer
• Matthias Pauli
• Peter Robineau
• Jan-Philipp Sasse
• Alexander Thommen
• Lucas Tochtermann
• Thilo Weber


Team 1 - Policy and Data

Which energy policy keywords and categories are relevant?

Step 1 - Brainstorming Keywords


Step 2 - Structuring Keywords

Clustering brainstorming results mind map and converting to a structured table


Team 2 - Web Scraping

Finding energy policy information on Swiss municipality websites.

## Step 1 - Manual Samples

Manually retrieving text data from few sample municipalities


Step 2 - Building a Scraper

As some research revealed, there is no service or implementation which could be used out of the box, so it was decided to go for a simple prototype implementation:

Semi automatic information gathering:

• Loop over 64 municipalities as test set
• For every municipality initiate a google search with municipality name and keywords «Energie Umwelt»
• Take top 3 google results
• Pick sentences where keywords from team 1 appear
• Run sentiment analysis over retrieved sentences


Scraper result set


Scraper result set - sentences and sentiment analysis detail


Reconciliation and Validation

Bringing the pieces together, checking if it makes sense...

Results Visualization

Visualize results on map (interactive map)


Showing municipalities by keywords on map (interactive)

• Energieberatung
• Subventionen
• Technologie


Sample Municipality Aadorf

Validating Sentences

Sentences analysis


Map Visualization

Analyzing details (interactive map)

• Thermal network - green
• High solar capacity (kW/cap) - red
• Energy city - blue


Final Pitch

By Jan-Philipp Sasse (with assistance of Thilo Weber)


Challenge Data and Code

See links below for Github repository (click on «Source» icon).