Hydropower also creates jobs and provides significant funding, most notably to mountain cantons and communes, through various charges and taxes.
In a European comparison, Switzerland is no. 4 in terms of contribution of hydropower towards electricity production, behind Norway, Austria and Iceland.
There are currently 579 hydropower power plants in Switzerland that have a capacity of at least 300 kilowatts. They generate a maximum output of 13,774 MW and an annual production potential of 35,913 gigawatt hours. The main water sources (feeding 532 power plants) are the Rhine (into which the Aara, Reuss and Limmat flow) and the Rhone.
The two mountain cantons, Valais and Graubünden, are the biggest producers: with a combined output of 17 TWh, they supply almost half of Switzerland's hydropower.
In Switzerland's hydropower plant statistics, a distinction is made between four types of plants: run-of-river (3,854 MW, 17,022 GWh/y), storage (8,081 MW, 17,296 GWh/y), pumped storage (1,594 MW, 1,383 GWh/y) and basic water flow plants (456 MW).
Large-scale hydropower plants (capacity greater than 10 MW) account for around 90% of Switzerland's total hydropower production.