THE CRUNCH
SWK Energie, the municipal utility of Krefeld in Germany, has launched an electricity plan called meinGAMING aimed at gamers and heavy power users. The structure is simple: pay a higher fixed monthly fee and get a lower price per kilowatt-hour. The utility says the maths starts to work at around 2,500 kWh a year, which is where its online calculator's "Casual Gamer" preset sits, with "Pro Gamer" and "Gaming Haushalt" presets defaulting to 3,500 and 5,000 kWh.
The gaming label is mostly branding. As TechPowerUp notes, the wall socket does not know what is plugged into it, so the same plan suits a household with a heat pump or an electric car just as well. A gaming PC alone is also unlikely to reach the 2,500 kWh threshold: even an RTX 5090 running at its full 575 W for 30 hours a week works out to roughly 900 kWh a year.
Pricing varies by postcode. One example for postcode 51381 listed 25.01 cents per kWh with a €23.67 monthly base fee, a €100 new customer bonus and a price guarantee of up to 24 months. That per-kWh rate was apparently raised after a rush of sign-ups. SWK says the electricity is 100% renewable, backed by certificates of origin from European hydroelectric plants.
Anyone in Germany tempted by the plan should compare it against regular tariffs for their own postcode before switching, since the break-even point depends entirely on how much electricity a household actually uses.