What Are These LEGs, Anyway? Local Electricity Communities Explained

Since January 1, 2026, something fundamentally new has been available in the Swiss electricity market: private individuals may sell self-generated electricity to their neighbors via the public grid. The framework for this is called a local electricity community, or LEG for short, and comes from the Electricity Supply Act, which was revised as part of the Energy Mantle Decree (the proposal approved by voters in June 2024 with 68.7 percent). This year, the first LEGs have launched, including in our region, and the first admission confirmations have raised questions: What exactly is this? And what does this “20 percent discount on grid usage” mean?

The principle: local electricity trading via the public grid

Until now, the rule was: if you had surplus solar power, you fed it into the grid and received a feed-in tariff from the grid operator. If you did not produce electricity, you bought it from the utility. A direct sale to a neighbor was only possible if you were physically connected behind the same grid connection (more on that shortly).

An LEG removes this boundary: producers, storage operators, and consumers in the same area join together contractually and trade electricity with one another at prices they set themselves, using the ordinary public grid. Physically, electricity takes the shortest route as always; the LEG is an accounting construct. The smart meter makes it possible: every 15 minutes, it measures who produces and consumes how much. If one member produces a surplus of 2 kWh in a 15-minute interval and other members consume at least 2 kWh at the same time, those 2 kWh are deemed to have been supplied within the community.

Anything not covered locally during a 15-minute interval continues to come from the basic supply as before. No one is suddenly “only connected to the sun” because of an LEG.

The discount: 20 or 40 percent off the grid usage energy rate

The legislator’s incentive: electricity traded within the LEG is subject to a reduced grid usage charge. The logic is based on physics: local electricity does not, or barely, use the higher grid levels (high voltage, transmission grid), so it should not pay the full grid tariff either.

The reduction is tiered:

• 40 percent discount if all participants are connected at the same grid level without transformation—in practice, to the same neighborhood grid behind the same transformer station.
• 20 percent discount once the exchange takes place across multiple grid levels, which applies to any municipality-wide LEG because transformer stations lie between the different local areas.

Important—and this is misunderstood in every discussion: the discount applies only to the energy rate for grid usage and only to kilowatt-hours traded internally within the LEG. The energy price, system services, federal levies, electricity reserve, metering charges, and basic charges remain unchanged. If you want to know what share of the electricity bill that actually represents: We broke down the bill item by item here. Whether anything remains in the end is calculated in the next article.

LEG, ZEV, vZEV: the distinction

The LEG is the third model in a family, and the terms are often confused:

In short: in a ZEV and vZEV, you own the line (or treat it that way for accounting purposes), so grid usage charges do not apply at all. An LEG uses the public grid and pays for it, just less. In return, it can scale across entire villages and cities.

Requirements for an LEG

For an LEG to be approved, a few basic rules apply:

• Same municipality, same grid operator: All participants must be located in the same municipal area and in the grid area of the same distribution grid operator.
• Generation capacity: Together, the LEG’s generation facilities must account for at least 5 percent of the total connected load of all participating end consumers. An LEG without meaningful generation is not intended.
• Smart meters for everyone: Without 15-minute metering, there can be no allocation. The widespread rollouts of recent years are paying off here.
• Contract and organization: The community itself determines prices, allocation keys, and administration; the grid operator provides meter data and bills the reduced grid usage charge.

Organize it yourself or choose the grid operator’s offering

In practice, there are two routes. The purist one: establish the LEG yourself, negotiate prices among members, and organize billing (a small market of billing service providers is currently emerging for this purpose). That maximizes flexibility and the potential benefit, but requires organizational work.

The convenient route: many grid operators now offer LEGs as a ready-made product, for example under the name “Gemeinsamstrom” in the EKZ area. EKZ handles formation, participant management, and billing; energy prices for consumers correspond to the basic supply, while local producers receive a fixed seasonal remuneration. EKZ charges a service fee per LEG kilowatt-hour for this service. The first municipality-wide LEGs of this kind launched in summer 2026, and enrollment is informal for consumers: sign up, wait for confirmation, done. Nothing changes at the meter, the connection, or the contract with the grid operator.

Convenience comes at a price, and in the grid operator model it is built into the service fee. How much it eats into the statutory discount depends on your own grid tariff; the details, including a sample calculation, are in the follow-up article, and anyone who wants to enter their own figures can use the LEG price calculator.

Context: what the LEG is meant to achieve

You can misunderstand the LEG as an investment vehicle and then be disappointed (under the grid operator’s standard offering, the financial effect for consumers who only purchase electricity is roughly zero). It is intended as a market instrument: local generation should find a local buyer and a fair price, producers should earn more than the meager feed-in tariff, and the grid should benefit when electricity is consumed where it is generated. Whether this works out will depend on participation, and that starts with understanding what you are signing up for.