Swiss Electricity MCP Server

🇨🇭⚡ swiss-electricity-mcp

MCP server for Swiss electricity data — three official sources, twelve tools, zero authentication.

🌍 Read this in your language: 🇩🇪 Deutsch

Part of the Swiss Public Data MCP Portfolio — a coordinated set of MCP servers for Swiss public administration.

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🔥 Anchor demo query

"How have ewz electricity tariffs for a typical school building (consumption category C3, ≈150'000 kWh/a) developed since 2019, and how do they compare to the Swiss median?"

A single conversation calls tariff_get_by_municipality (bfs_nr=261, category="C3") + tariff_get_median_swiss and returns a year-by-year comparison with full provenance — ready for a Geschäftsleitung slide.

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📊 What's inside

Three official Swiss data sources combined into one MCP server, each with its own dedicated tool group:

No authentication required. All endpoints are public Swiss OGD.

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🛠️ Tools (12)

dashboard_* — Energiedashboard.ch (BFE)

• dashboard_get_production_mix — Production mix by year (TWh + %): Kernkraft, Wasserkraft, PV, Wind, thermal.
• dashboard_get_consumption_forecast — Current consumption forecast + 5-day outlook + 5-year envelope.
• dashboard_get_storage_lakes — Speichersee fill level (CH or per region: Wallis, Tessin, Graubünden, Zentral/Ost) — critical winter-supply indicator.
• dashboard_get_consumer_price_index — Endverbraucher-Strompreis-Index (2020-01-01 = 100).

tariff_* — ElCom (via LINDAS SPARQL)

• tariff_list_categories — H1–H8 (households) and C1–C7 (commercial). C3 ≈ 150'000 kWh/a is the typical reference for school buildings.
• tariff_get_by_municipality — Tariffs for a BFS-Nr + category + year range, broken into energy / grid usage / KEV / Abgaben.
• tariff_get_median_swiss — National median benchmark.
• tariff_get_median_canton — Cantonal median (e.g. for Kanton Zürich).
• tariff_compare_municipalities — Compare up to 20 municipalities side-by-side.

consumption_* — opendata.swiss + Stadt Zürich OGD

• consumption_search_bfe_datasets — CKAN search across BFE-published datasets.
• consumption_search_zurich — CKAN search across Stadt Zürich OGD (includes quarter-hour NE5/NE7 consumption).

Status

• electricity_check_status — Liveness probe across all four upstreams (HTTP status + latency + overall-healthy flag).

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🚀 Installation

From PyPI

pip install swiss-electricity-mcp

From source

git clone https://github.com/malkreide/swiss-electricity-mcp.git
cd swiss-electricity-mcp
pip install -e ".[dev]"

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💬 Use with Claude Desktop

Add to claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "swiss-electricity": {
      "command": "swiss-electricity-mcp"
    }
  }
}

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☁️ Cloud deployment (Streamable HTTP)

SWISS_ELECTRICITY_TRANSPORT=streamable-http \
SWISS_ELECTRICITY_HOST=0.0.0.0 \
SWISS_ELECTRICITY_PORT=8000 \
swiss-electricity-mcp

Works on Render.com, Railway, Fly.io.

Host binding (security). In HTTP mode the host defaults to 127.0.0.1 (loopback only). Bind to all interfaces with SWISS_ELECTRICITY_HOST=0.0.0.0 only inside a container, where the network boundary is the container, not the host. Setting 0.0.0.0 on a developer machine exposes the server to the local network (NeighborJack).

Docker

A multi-stage Dockerfile is provided. It runs as a non-root user (UID 10001) and sets SWISS_ELECTRICITY_HOST=0.0.0.0 explicitly for the containerised case.

docker build -t swiss-electricity-mcp .
docker run --rm -p 8000:8000 swiss-electricity-mcp

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🔭 Observability & configuration

• Logging is structured JSON on stderr (stdout is reserved for the stdio JSON-RPC channel). Upstream failures are logged in full server-side but masked in client-facing responses.

• Tracing is opt-in. Install the extra and point it at a collector:

  pip install "swiss-electricity-mcp[otel]"
  OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT=http://localhost:4318 swiss-electricity-mcp
  

  You get one span per tool call (mcp.tool.<name>) plus automatic httpx child spans for each upstream request. No argument values or PII are recorded.

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🏗️ Architecture

          ┌────────────────────────── MCP client (Claude etc.) ──────────────────────────┐
          │                          stdio  or  Streamable HTTP                           │
          └───────────────────────────────────────┬──────────────────────────────────────┘
                                                   │  12 read-only tools (annotated)
                                          ┌────────▼─────────┐
                                          │  FastMCP server   │  egress allow-list + HTTPS gate
                                          │  + structlog/OTel │  per-source TTL cache + retry
                                          └───┬────────┬───┬──┘
                  dashboard_* │ tariff_*      │        │   │   consumption_*
                              ▼               ▼        ▼   ▼
                  ┌───────────────────┐ ┌───────────┐ ┌──────────────┐ ┌─────────────────────┐
                  │ Energiedashboard  │ │  LINDAS   │ │ opendata.swiss│ │ data.stadt-zuerich.ch│
                  │ .admin.ch (BFE)   │ │  SPARQL   │ │   CKAN        │ │   CKAN (OGD)         │
                  └───────────────────┘ └───────────┘ └──────────────┘ └─────────────────────┘

Hybrid (live API + SPARQL + CKAN discovery), no authentication. Three reasons this is the right shape:

1. Different latency profiles per source: Energiedashboard responds in ~200 ms (great live); LINDAS SPARQL is slower and occasionally returns 504 (longer timeout + 3 retries); CKAN is metadata-only and inherently safe.
2. Different update cadences: Dashboard updates intraday; ElCom tariffs update once per year; OGD datasets are stable for months. Per-source TTL caching (600 s / 3600 s) reflects this.
3. Domain separation from swiss-energy-mcp: that server covers geo and infrastructure data (power plants, grid lines). swiss-electricity-mcp covers time-series and tariffs. Both compose cleanly.

Provenance discipline

Every tool response is a Pydantic envelope carrying:

• source — full attribution string (e.g. "Daten: Bundesamt für Energie (BFE)…").
• provenance — exactly one of live_api / sparql / cached / weekly_dump / stale_cache_fallback.
• retrieved_at — ISO-8601 UTC timestamp.

This makes accidental misattribution structurally impossible.

Resilience

• Retry: 3 attempts with exponential backoff (2 s / 4 s / 8 s).
• 5xx + 429: retried. 4xx (except 429): raised immediately (permanent client error).
• In-memory TTL cache: per-source TTLs reduce upstream load and round-trip during multi-step agent workflows.

MCP primitives — why Tools only

This server intentionally exposes only Tools, not Resources or Prompts. The data is parametric and query-driven (a municipality BFS number, a category, a year), which maps naturally to tool calls; there is no stable, enumerable set of documents to expose as Resources, and no curated prompt templates to ship. If a future use case needs, say, a fixed "national production mix" document, the read-only dashboard_* tools are the obvious Resource-migration candidates.

Project phase

Phase 1 — read-only. All 12 tools are read-only (readOnlyHint=true) with no write or destructive operations. Phase-transition criteria and the longer-term plan live in docs/roadmap.md. Security posture (egress, supply-chain, lethal-trifecta assessment) is documented in docs/security-posture.md.

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🧪 Testing

# Unit tests (mocked, fast, CI default) — tests/test_unit.py + tests/test_security.py
PYTHONPATH=src pytest -m "not live" -v

# Live tests (hits real upstreams) — tests/test_live.py
PYTHONPATH=src pytest -m live -v

Unit tests cover the contract layers: Happy (response parsing), Retry (5xx, 429, 4xx), Timeout (network errors → clean UpstreamUnreachableError), envelope/attribution invariants, plus security (egress allow-list, SPARQL escaping, tool-definition lock). CI runs ruff + pytest -m "not live" on Python 3.11–3.13.

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🔌 MCP protocol version

This server is built on the official MCP Python SDK (mcp[cli]), pinned to >=1.2.0,<2.0.0. The MCP protocol version is negotiated by the SDK at the initialize handshake; the supported spec version tracks the pinned SDK (currently MCP spec 2025-11-25).

Update policy: SDK updates arrive as weekly Dependabot PRs. A protocol-spec bump is only adopted via an explicit SDK minor/major bump, recorded in CHANGELOG.md, and verified against the tool-definition lock (tool-definitions.lock.json).

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⚠️ Known limitations

• LINDAS SPARQL 504 timeouts: the LINDAS public endpoint occasionally returns 504 under load. The 3-retry policy handles transient cases; persistent unavailability surfaces as UpstreamUnreachableError.
• No historical PV/wind detail: Energiedashboard exposes only aggregated production mix at year level. For sub-yearly PV or wind, use consumption_search_bfe_datasets.
• No FHIR or smart-meter data: out of scope. Future work may add a swiss-prosumer-mcp or similar.
• Year coverage: ElCom tariff data starts in 2009. Energiedashboard mix starts in 2014.

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🌐 Portfolio synergy

This server composes naturally with other portfolio servers:

• + swiss-energy-mcp — combine geo/asset data (power plants) with time-series and tariffs for full energy-infrastructure analysis.
• + meteoswiss-mcp — correlate consumption forecasts with weather (temperature drives heating/cooling load).
• + fedlex-mcp — pair tariff data with the Stromversorgungsgesetz (StromVG) for compliance/legal context.
• + zh-education-mcp — Schulamt-relevant queries combining tariffs, school counts, infrastructure budgets.

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📜 Data sources & licensing

All upstream data is Open Government Data Switzerland (OGD-CH):

• Energiedashboard.ch © Bundesamt für Energie BFE — Open data, free to use.
• ElCom / LINDAS © Eidgenössische Elektrizitätskommission ElCom — CC BY 4.0.
• opendata.swiss © Various Swiss public bodies — Mostly CC0 / CC BY 4.0.
• Stadt Zürich OGD © Stadt Zürich — CC0.

This MCP server is MIT-licensed (see LICENSE). Always cite the original data source — the response envelope includes the proper attribution string automatically.

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🤝 Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md.

🔒 Security

See SECURITY.md for the security policy and how to report a vulnerability.

📝 Changelog

See CHANGELOG.md.