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Swiss Household Energy Demand Survey (SHEDS)

The Swiss Household Energy Demand (SHEDS) has been developed as part of the Competence Center for Research in Energy, Society, and Transition (SCCER CREST). As of 2023, the SHEDS continues as part of the SWEET CoSi consortium, Work Package 1. SHEDS is designed to collect a comprehensive description of the Swiss households’ energy‐related behaviors, their longitudinal changes and the existing potentials for future energy demand reduction. Currently, the survey includes five annual waves from 2016 to 2021 and one wave in 2023. SHEDS is planned to continue with 3 more annual waves in 2025, 2027 and 2029, thus generating a rolling panel dataset of 5,000 respondents per wave, spanning over a 14-year period.

The data contain information on equipment and use for the same households in three different fields of energy consumption:

  • Heating: heating system, temperature, use of hot water, etc.
  • Electricity: type and efficiency of appliances, usage of electrical appliances, etc.
  • Mobility: type and efficiency of vehicle, vehicle size and usage (km), distance to workplace, etc.

The collected household characteristics include socio-economic and psychological variables. Time-varying characteristics are being collected in every wave of the survey in order to track changes over time. Time‐invariant characteristics, however, are collected only once, at the time of the respondent’s first entrance in SHEDS.

Geographical scope Switzerland (excluding Ticino)
Geographical resolution Households
Temporal scope and resolution 2016-2021, 2023 (1 year resolution)
Method Online survey
Questionnaires 2023 (856 kB)
2021 (1.5 MB)
2020 (1 MB)
2019 (762 kB)
2018 (2 MB)
2017 (3 MB)
2016 (607 kB)
Data access The data has open access for academic researchers within the legal limits imposed by confidentiality of respondents. All researchers using the data are required to send their request to Valentine Grutta enclosing a signed PDF version of the confidentiality agreement. Data accessible for commercial and societal purposes depending on financial agreement
Contact Valentine Grutta, UniNE
Mehdi Farsi, UniNE
Sylvain Weber, HES-SO
Cite as Weber, S., Burger. P., Farsi, M., Martinez‐Cruz, A.L., Puntiroli, M.; Schubert, I., Volland, B. (2017): Swiss Household Energy Demand Survey (SHEDS): Objectives, design, and implementation, SCCER CREST Working Paper WP2 – 2017/04.
Selected publications using SHEDS List of selected publications using SHEDS