Has any “zurcher” invested in the offer from EWZ? With 250chf you buy 1square meter of solar panels for 20 years and they give you 80kwh yearly for free.
It’s not a way of making money or saving money right now, but who knows where the prices are going in the future.
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Seemed to bad of a deal to me at the the time of the offer. But yeah if power price triples early in those 20 years it would have been a good deal.
Agreed.
The energy tariff (approx. 50 percent) and the grid usage tariff (approx. 40 percent) account for the majority of the electricity price, with the remainder being levies (approx. 10 percent). The offer from EWZ replaces the energy tariff for 20 years, while grid usage and levies continue to be billed.
Numbers in the post are wrong, please see below
I see energy prices until 2027, and the prices will drop back to approx 0.8-0.9 CHF/kWh (energy only). So, over a span of 20y you would save approx. 1’280 CHF.
Not to shabby I would say.
Biggest risk : energy prices will drop considerably (which can actually happen), while network prices will rise (which will happen definitively)
I saw it is as marketing gag only, but I’m sure it rings a bell with today’s consumers and benefits the EWZ’s image.
For a serious investment, a bond issue to finance solar power installments would seem more logical (e.g. investors would not have to live in Zurich to benefit).
Can you elaborate? Where did you get this from?
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Oh shoot, did a unit mistake, It is of course it is 0.08-0.09 CHF/kWh.
So only a return of 128 CHF in 20 y. Not at all nice anymore… was already thinking that it was quite high.
Sorry about that… Lesson taken that I should not type this kind of stuff during a short breather break 
Otherwise the source is my job where I see energy prices on forward contracts.
Just noted that 2028 already came out and that prices are even dropping more (going towards 0.05-0.07 CHF/kWh. The drop in price is mostly explainable by the renewables taking over, especially in summer.
If someone is more interested, happy to share how it actually works (energy buying etc.)
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I think the whole idea is a “feel good” thing for the clients. EWZ might get some cheap money to build infrastructure.
I’m still thinking of doing it sooner or later. Just to feel good. 
I just wonder what happens if I move where EWZ doesn’t serve.
They buy it back: ewz.solar | Fragen und Antworten | ewz
(And yeah last time I looked into it, seems like marketing and no way to invest or save any money)
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Did you mean 0.08-0.09?
I looked at it some time ago and agree with the above: It makes no sense financially.
I’d also say it’s not a feel good option. You get zero-CO2 electricity in Zurich anyway, so no CO2 is saved that way (if you factor in production / installation, if might be actually more CO2 intensive). It’s also not much of a energy security option: While electricity is produced locally and reliably as long as the sun is shining, the sun is not shining most of the time.
So it’s basically an expensive marketing / image campaign. I do wonder how much cheaper electricity would be if EWZ would simply concentrate on their core job instead of these image campaigns…
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Oh come on. EWZ made 370M profit with 1570M turnover in 2023. How much do you think does this ‘expensive marketing capaigns’ cost in absolute terms?
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Maybe we need to get Elon’s DOGE team on it 
I am pretty sure their overall marketing will cost several million and they are a monopoly, they wouldn’t need to do any marketing for commercial reasons at all. So this is purely politically driven, as is their solar campaign, there are no actual benefits to that.
And it’s very obvious that their prices are too high. They had a profit margin of almost 24% in 2023 and they are a public utility. So lower prices by 30% and get rid of all marketing and image campaigns and they’d still be able to provide their core service just fine.
It might be an involuntary profit. They shouldn’t sell energy below prices just because they are public owned or whatever.
The marketing is used to push people to be more ecologic. That’s fine imho. Also free money to build more solar installations.
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They need a communication team anyway, This kind of marketing is peanuts compared to that (total personal costs is about 10% of the revenue, pretty good actually)
And they have branches which are in the open market, for instance consulting (electromobility, services to other providers (buying energy, consulting mandates etc.), selling energy to bigger consumers (everything above 100’000 kWh/a), communication solutions, district heating etc.
They are offering a product which is outside of the monopoly business (anyone could do that actually). If people are buying it, it is their problem. It is like buying a overpriced phone or car. Selling good feeling.
Both monopoly and extra services have to be completely separated, and prices are controlled by a federal agency with strict rules. BTW, you can see that in 2023 they did less revenue but could improve their profit margin substantially. This is essentially due to better energy supply (approx 400’000 CHF less than 2022) which could not be priced in right away, since the 2023 prices for regular consumers are fixed in August 2022 (by law).
Furthermore, you have to understand that huge investments will be needed in the future, and therefore a financial buffer has to be created now to be actually able to do that (basically we have to substantially reinforce our energy grid especially wherever there are single family homes - but the whole community has to pay for it).
Finally, 80 MCHF are going directly as a dividend to the town, which means lowering the taxes for everyone.
I think it’s a general problem. While there is not enough money for core state services such as pensions, public money is wasted freely elsewhere. If there ever would be a Swiss Elon Musk, he’d have a field day cutting billions easily. Plus a few million from a local Zurich utility. Do that with every local utility in the country and it will add up to a pretty tidy sum.
The solar offering is actually fair, since if you want that, you have to pay extra. Maybe they should outsource their unnecessary marketing likewise. Whoever wants to pay for that, because it’s so “cheap” and they like to tell others how to behave, should do so. Whoever just wants to have electricity could then get that for cheaper.
Which, coming back to the original topic, is the only use the solar programme has, collecting money from those who like to pay more for much the same thing (you always get electricity from renewables from EWZ).
FWIW, it’s often more complicated. A provider can e.g. build some renewable electricity generation far away and then claim it’s all renewable even if you end up important dirty electricity from e.g. Germany.
It still makes sense for provider to increase the local capacity or improve HVDC connection to their wind farm/solar farms, because that one is truly renewable.
Yes, plus it’s electricity production under local control (in an energy crisis I doubt that other countries would send electricity to Switzerland). So local production is a good idea.
But solar is basically only running 20% of the time, so it’s a bit of a limited solution and a dangerous delusion to think solar (or renewables in general) can reliably provide electricity.
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It’s still part of the solution 
(and with battery price following the same curve as solar panel price, that still becomes a fairly important part the solution )