GeniLac Lake-Water Thermal Grid
This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed below and checked against them before publication. It has not had a complete human fact-check — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources.
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✎ Corrected 27 Aug 2026 Publication date recorded for 4 sources. What changed →
SIG pumps cold water from Lake Geneva through a planned ~30 km hydrothermal network to heat and cool buildings across the city. It grew from GLN (Genève-Lac-Nations), a 5 km network with a lakeside pumping station born in 2008; UN Geneva was its first customer, connecting in 2009, with the WHO, ITU, WTO and WMO following. GeniLac now runs as two loops — an open one into the city centre as far as the Rhône, and a closed one reaching the airport and the Quartier de l'Etang — with further loops planned for the PAV district, the Gare des Eaux-Vives and the university hospitals. SIG says the installation runs on 100% renewable electricity and cuts the electricity a connected building uses for cooling by 80%, and its heating CO2 by 80%.
what does this mean?
The strongest source is the operator's or the city's own reporting — an official report, dataset or press release. It grades who did the looking — not how well the project went. All four grades →📊 Impact
SIG reports that GeniLac produced 33 GWh of cooling and heat in 2021, nearly 30% more than in 2020, with 68 customers connected. The headline savings are a projection: by 2045, once 350 buildings are connected, SIG expects 70 GWh of electricity saved a year — the annual consumption of 27,000 households — and 70,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases avoided a year for the Canton of Geneva.
🎓 Lesson
Almost every number attached to this network points at 2045. The delivered ones are smaller and older: 33 GWh of heat and cold in 2021, 68 customers, against 350 buildings two decades out. A visiting reporter was told in 2022 that the network would be finished by 2024, which is the kind of date worth re-checking before quoting the savings that depend on it. And the 80% is SIG's own figure, used both for the international organisations that connected to GLN and switched off their chillers and for the installation as a whole — a reduction measured where a building had an inefficient chiller to replace, not a saving that transfers to any building anywhere.
Sources
Show your work What this page rests on and what it can’t tell you · all 7 claims with their sources · the forensic record
Evidence Passport · public beta 7 addressable claims, 4 source dossiers, one permanent baseline. The passport is unreviewed — an AI-assisted structural migration, not a human or expert endorsement. Every revision keeps a permanent copy under revision history.
Inspect the claims, one by one — verbatim text, sources and caveats for all 7
The text below is copied verbatim from the published record. Each claim names the source dossiers that carry it; caveats stay attached to the claim they qualify.
clm-e3df02900293c086
quantitative
SIG pumps cold water from Lake Geneva through a planned ~30 km hydrothermal network to heat and cool buildings across the city
Sources carrying this claim
clm-8394fad0985ebec8
quantitative
It grew from GLN (Genève-Lac-Nations), a 5 km network with a lakeside pumping station born in 2008; UN Geneva was its first customer, connecting in 2009, with the WHO, ITU, WTO and WMO following
Sources carrying this claim
clm-8eaefb055011570c
descriptive
GeniLac now runs as two loops — an open one into the city centre as far as the Rhône, and a closed one reaching the airport and the Quartier de l'Etang — with further loops planned for the PAV district, the Gare des Eaux-Vives and the university hospitals
Sources carrying this claim
clm-286ea7ed98e2e383
quantitative
SIG says the installation runs on 100% renewable electricity and cuts the electricity a connected building uses for cooling by 80%, and its heating CO2 by 80%
Sources carrying this claim
clm-2137f63874c6db2f
quantitative
SIG reports that GeniLac produced 33 GWh of cooling and heat in 2021, nearly 30% more than in 2020, with 68 customers connected
Sources carrying this claim
clm-e6f2db2fd0955e12
quantitative
by 2045, once 350 buildings are connected, SIG expects 70 GWh of electricity saved a year — the annual consumption of 27,000 households — and 70,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases avoided a year for the Canton of Geneva
Sources carrying this claim
clm-e7119af58afc41a6
quantitative
A visiting reporter was told in 2022 that the network would be finished by 2024
Sources carrying this claim
Forensic record — source dossiers, gaps, hashes and the exact revision this page renders
This layer records what is known about each source, what is still missing, and the exact snapshot this page is rendering. A missing date, archive or hash stays visible as missing.
Awaiting operator and domain-expert review; publication of this revision implies neither.
sha256:77d2cbbd1a0bb260f0c8bd90a45df80d2c0d3c9e8422087c6d6887622208ea91
- 7
- of 7 claims mapped
- 4
- source dossiers
- 2
- publication dates recorded
- 0
- archives linked
- 0
- exact locators
- 0
- content captures hashed
Governance facts carried by the record
- Operator
- SIG (Services Industriels de Genève)
- Actor types
- utility
- Funding model
- utility
- Funding description
- Not recorded
- Cost
- ≈CHF 800 million ($805 million) — swissinfo (2019) attaches the figure to the new pumping station, Geneva Solutions (2022) to the whole project
- Ownership
- Not recorded
- Decision rights
- Not recorded
- Exit conditions
- Not recorded
4 source dossiers
SIG (authority)
- Stable source ID
src-378b9aa9d8a652a0- Publisher
- Name not classified · ww2.sig-ge.ch
- Type / language
- web-page · language not classified
- Published
- Not recorded
- Updated
- Not recorded
- Source last checked
- No source-level check date
- Record last verified
- 2026-08-27
- Dossier created
- 2026-08-27
- Retrieved copy
- No local capture recorded
- Archive
- No archived copy linked
- Content hash
- No captured content hash
- Locator
- Descriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
Open the recorded source note
SIG's own account of the GeniLac deployment. Source for the two loops and their reach, the 80% reductions, the 2045 projection, the delivered 2021 output (33 GWh of cooling and heat, nearly 30% up on 2020) and the 68 customers then connected, and for the prehistory: 'GLN, Genève-Lac-Nations, est né en 2008, composé d'une station de pompage au bord du lac et d'un réseau de 5 km', with UN Geneva connecting first in 2009 and the WHO, ITU, WTO and WMO following. The page carries no date of its own; its content describes 2022. The page states no publication date.
swissinfo (press)
- Stable source ID
src-0f174226b3545185- Publisher
- Name not classified · swissinfo.ch
- Type / language
- web-page · language not classified
- Published
- 2019-11-07
- Updated
- Not recorded
- Source last checked
- No source-level check date
- Record last verified
- 2026-08-27
- Dossier created
- 2026-08-27
- Retrieved copy
- No local capture recorded
- Archive
- No archived copy linked
- Content hash
- No captured content hash
- Locator
- Descriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
Open the recorded source note
Published 7 November 2019. Gives the cost with a dollar equivalent — 'A CHF800 million ($805 million) new pumping station is under construction north of Geneva as part of the Genilac project' — attaching the figure to the pumping station rather than the whole network. Its separate 80% cooling figure refers to a hotel in Lucerne, not to GeniLac.
- Claims linked
- Background source; no baseline claim points here
Geneva Solutions (press)
- Stable source ID
src-f5ce48a071f0be05- Publisher
- Name not classified · genevasolutions.news
- Type / language
- web-page · language not classified
- Published
- 2022-08-05
- Updated
- Not recorded
- Source last checked
- No source-level check date
- Record last verified
- 2026-08-27
- Dossier created
- 2026-08-27
- Retrieved copy
- No local capture recorded
- Archive
- No archived copy linked
- Content hash
- No captured content hash
- Locator
- Descriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
Open the recorded source note
Published 5 August 2022, from a Heidi.news site visit. Source for the 30 km extent, the Vengeron pumping station, pipes submerged at 45 metres drawing water at about 7 degrees, the 68 customers, and two figures worth keeping apart from SIG's: 'The project is expected to be completed by 2024 for a total outlay of around CHF 800 million.'
SIG — reseau GeniLac (authority)
- Stable source ID
src-3f3c0ddf3002dd9a- Publisher
- Name not classified · ww2.sig-ge.ch
- Type / language
- web-page · language not classified
- Published
- Not recorded
- Updated
- Not recorded
- Source last checked
- No source-level check date
- Record last verified
- 2026-08-27
- Dossier created
- 2026-08-27
- Retrieved copy
- No local capture recorded
- Archive
- No archived copy linked
- Content hash
- No captured content hash
- Locator
- Descriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
Open the recorded source note
Official GeniLac page by the Geneva utility SIG. The page states no publication date.
- Claims linked
- Background source; no baseline claim points here
Known limits of this passport
- Publisher names and source languages have not yet been classified; domains are recorded without guessing.
- Existing source notes are descriptive locators, not page- or paragraph-exact citations.
- A missing archive, publication date or content hash is shown as null rather than inferred.
- The project-level evidence grade ranks the strongest source in the entry; it is not a truth score for every claim.
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📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “GeniLac Lake-Water Thermal Grid” — Geneva, Switzerland. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/geneva-genilac/ (last verified 2026-08-27). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.