How much energy do our solar plants produce, and what does it actually mean? Kettles, bikes, elephants and even the whole of Switzerland: here are our figures turned into pictures, for young and old alike.
kW or kWh? The story of the tap
Power is how fast the tap is running. It tells you how much energy is flowing at this very moment. The live counter on our website shows kW: it rises when the sun shines and drops to zero at night.
Energy is the water that collects in the bucket. A power of 1 kW for 1 hour gives 1 kWh. That is what your electricity meter measures, and what we have been adding up since 2004.
1 MWh = 1,000 kWh · 1 GWh = 1,000 MWh · 1 TWh = 1,000 GWh
Right now, our solar plants supply…
These figures follow the real output of our six solar plants, updated every minute.
That’s the power of:
It’s night-time: our panels are resting. Come back during the day to see what they supply, or look below at what they have already produced.
What our solar plants have already produced
That’s the equivalent of:
The energy ladder
Where does our production stand between charging a smartphone and the consumption of the whole country? The orange bars are ours.
- Charging a smartphone
- A 5-minute hot shower
- A Swiss household for one day
- Our solar plants, today
- A Swiss household for a year
- A trip around the Earth by electric car
- Our solar plants, over the whole of 2025
- Our solar plants, since 2004
- A nuclear power plant (Gösgen) in a year
- All of Switzerland in a year
Logarithmic scale: each mark is 1,000 times larger than the previous one. Otherwise, the smartphone charge would be invisible next to Switzerland!
Your turn to play!
Pick an appliance, how many you switch on and for how long: find out how much energy it takes, and how long our solar plants need to produce it.
Sources and assumptions
- Swiss household: about 4,000 kWh of electricity per year (the same assumption as on our home page).
- Switzerland: about 56 TWh of electricity consumed per year (Swiss Federal Office of Energy, electricity statistics).
- Gösgen nuclear power plant: about 8 TWh produced per year.
- Electric car: about 17 kWh per 100 km; 11 kW home charging point.
- Elephant: 6 tonnes hoisted from sea level to 4,478 m (potential energy m × g × h, with no losses at all).
- Chocolate: about 530 kcal per 100 g; 1 kWh = 860 kcal.
- These values are rounded orders of magnitude, meant for comparison rather than exact calculation.