Dear all,

I really need you advice. I am sure that most of the forum members living in Zurich, are already using EWZ as their provider. Therefore I would like to ask you couple of questions.

1. I received a letter from EWZ, and I am given 4 choices to choose from concerning my electricity bill (see bellow). Can you please explain me what is the difference between the quality of each of these choices, and which one would be the best one ?



2. I notice that the peak hours are: Mo - Sa: 06.00h to 22.00h. Do you know any estimation of average electricity usage per person in Switzerland (especially in the peak hours, if possible) ?

Thank you very much in advance,
Alen

P.S. I am fully aware that this question is quite similar to the one posted on EWZ - which choice for electricity?, but since this thread is about 2 years old, I would like to double-check whether the conditions changed meanwhile.

Guys, anyone ?

There is no difference in the quality of the electricity, it's "the same electricity". You simply have an option to influence what type of generation ewz buys.

- ökopower is hydro and solar
- naturpower is hydro, biomass and wind
- mixpower is is nuclear, "non-certified" hydro (so probably indirectly french nuclear or something) and kehricht (which I assume is energy created from burning trash?)
- solartop is then only solar which you can mix with the other products if I understand correctly.

I'm not sure what the average electricity consumption of a swiss household is, I guess you can google around but it depends (a lot) on how your energy consumption patterns, such as how you heat your house, water etc.

Which option you should choose just depends on what technologies you want to support. I would recommend supporting renewable technologies (solar / wind) for the sake of advancing those. All of these options are pretty environment friendly though, you can't even choose polluting/green-house-gas emitting technologies such as coal, oil and gas (although you don't know where the non-certified hydro originates).

Hope this clarifies something..

Take the cheapest one. Most of the energy is produced in atomic power plants.

In my apartment my monthly power bill runs at about 6 kWh per day per person, but then I have an awfully power hungry fridge that consumes most of that.

With my power provider, that works out at CHF 1.24 per day, or CHF 37.10 per month per person

Your mileage will vary: with a modern fridge expect power costs to be half of what I pay.

In general, you'd expect to be around, or under, 1 CHF per day.

Wrong! 39.6% of the energy is produced in nuclear power plants.