It appears that the Swiss are concerned with growth in electricity demand from the rising use of decorative lights. This is understandable, especially if they are looking at lights in America as an example of what's to come.
It has always been common for people in the U.S. to put up large, garish lighting displays, some with over 10,000 bulbs and using thousands of watts of power. There are also a lot of people with the big C-7 and C-9 bulbs (5 and 7 watts per bulb! ) in their lighting displays here. Just a single string of 50 C-7s will gobble up 250 watts of power.
A big craze I have seen are inflatable figures which are made of a nylon or vinyl material and are kept inflated by a constantly-running electric blower. Some houses have huge numbers of these, their lawn looks like some fairy-tale land.
The lighting display that I have up consumes about 500 watts, and is on for 5 hours per night. That's 2.5 kWh of electricity per night, equating to about 100 kWh and 200 pounds of coal (someone must have been naughty! ) over the course of the whole holiday season. This is roughly the middle of the road, as there are many displays which use less electricity and many that use much more.
Our yearly household electricity consumption with heavy heating use (no wood stove) is about 20 MWh, therefore the lights account for 0.5% of our annual consumption.
I'd say it is just a matter of common sense - either have the motivation to turn them off each night or install a timer to turn them off automatically. Don't install gaudy decorations that are tacky looking or excessive, and when buying new lights look for the much more efficient LED style. I like the look of the lights on trees and shrubs at night, but only in moderation. Those cheese plastic snowmen and Santa Claus figures also can be run with 25-watt or 40-watt incandescent bulbs. I have neighbors who have 100-watt bulbs in theirs and it glows like a second sun, needlessly burning coal and producing light pollution (since they tend to leave them on all night).
I have installed several strings of LED lights, which use ten times less energy than the incandescent mini-bulbs. It would be nice to replace the incandescent strings with LED, but most of them are in very good working order and it would be senseless to throw them away and buy new prematurely considering that they are only used for one month out of the year.
If you do decide to toss your old lights, remember that those wires are made from copper, and copper is a fairly precious metal. There are also many people who collect old lights on eBay and such. You could also donate them to someone. Save the good bulbs for replacements on other strings. All of those options beat throwing them in the trash.
