Is a Home Battery Worth It in the Netherlands Once Net Metering Ends in 2027?

Ook in het Nederlands: Is een thuisbatterij de moeite waard na het einde van salderen?

From 1 January 2027 the Netherlands stops net metering. That makes a home battery more attractive than it is today, because power you use in your home will be worth about 20 cents a kilowatt-hour more than power you export back to the grid.

Does a battery pay for itself? This is an important question to ask as these changes take place, and it is the key question this article aims to answer.

We modelled a typical home in Amsterdam and Eindhoven, with and without an electric car, under net metering and without it, at the prices Consumentenbond publishes. We use a model that combines five years of historical solar data with energy consumption modelling to look at how these changes to net metering will affect the decision. The outcomes are summarised below, and the rest of the article discusses them, so read on.

What changes on 1 January 2027

Until the end of 2026 it has not mattered when you use your solar energy, because the meter does a subtraction for you. What you send to the grid in summer is taken off what you buy back in winter, kilowatt-hour for kilowatt-hour. That is net metering, salderen, and it makes every kilowatt-hour you export worth the full 26 cents you pay for one.[1]

From 1 January 2027 the subtraction stops, and when you use your solar energy matters. You pay about 26 cents for what you take from the grid. Your supplier pays you a feed-in compensation for what you send out, which by law is at least half your bare supply rate until 2030. At the CBS average tariff for August 2026 that is about 6 cents, and suppliers may charge a feed-in fee on top.[2]

So the same kilowatt-hour is worth 26 cents used at home and 6 cents sent out. That 20 cent gap is new, and it is the only reason a battery, or a change of habit, is worth thinking about.

Before you price a battery, ask the simpler question first. Can I use more of my own power during the day? In a Dutch house with gas heating there are four loads you can move: the dishwasher, the washing machine, the dryer and, if there is one, the electric vehicle.

What we tested

A family home in Amsterdam and one in Eindhoven, three or four people, gas heating and hot water, no air conditioning, twelve panels (5 kW) on an unshaded south-facing roof. Each home was run twice, with an electric car on a wall charger and without. Two batteries, 5 and 10 kWh at €4,000 and €6,000, the ends of the range Consumentenbond gives for an average system.[5] Power at 26 cents. Exports at 26 cents under net metering, 6 cents from 2027, and 3 cents in case feed-in fees take half.

Before and after: what a battery does under net metering, and without it

Under net metering the grid already stores your surplus solar for free, with no losses and no size limit. Store a kilowatt-hour in a battery instead and nothing changes on the bill, except that the 10% lost in the round trip is bought back at 26 cents. In the model a 10 kWh battery ends a year under net metering about €50 worse off than no battery, and timing your loads is worth nothing. Take net metering away and the same battery, the same habit and the two together all start earning, as the chart below shows.

Building the simulator, this was the result that surprised us. We expected net metering to make a battery merely unnecessary. It makes it a small, steady loss, because the grid has been a battery with no round-trip losses, and a home battery is 90% efficient. A battery installed before the change starts earning on 1 January 2027, whichever month it goes in.

Option one: no battery. Run the house, and the car, on the sun

The other option is not to buy a battery and, first, change when things run. This costs you nothing. Move the dishwasher, the washing and the dryer into the sunniest hours, and charge the car at midday instead of in the evening. It starts reducing your energy costs on 1 January. The appliances are small, about 2 kWh a day, and the solar covers nearly all of it. The car is the big one, 6 kWh a day, and the solar covers only just over half of that, because an Amsterdam afternoon in November does not have 7 kWh to spare. With 39% of new cars sold in 2025 fully electric, a lot of driveways can make that change.[10]

This is what to expect (based on our model) if you do it and buy no battery. The home without a car saves about €120 a year and uses 24% of its own solar power instead of 13%. The home with a car, if the car is home to charge in the day, saves about €230 a year and uses 35% of its own power. Over ten years that is €1,359 and €2,589, and it is more than a battery bought at €6,000 has earned you by the same point.

Option two: a battery. From 2027, does it pay for itself?

At €6,000, yes, in about fourteen years with a car and fifteen without. The 10 kWh battery saves the Amsterdam home €333 a year without a car and €371 with one, rising with the tariff. Six thousand divided by three hundred and fifty is a long time. Eindhoven comes out within a year of Amsterdam.

The car adds less to the battery than you might expect, for two reasons. In summer the house's own evening load already takes most of what a 10 kWh battery holds, and in winter there is nothing to put in it. The pattern of charging matters too. The calculator charges the car once a week in one long session, which a 9 kWh battery can only part-cover. A car that tops up every evening gives the battery more to do: it then saves €424 a year, pays for itself in 12.5 years, and the ten-year price rises to about €4,700.

The price is what moves the answer, so the chart below turns it around. It shows the price below which each battery has repaid itself inside ten years, the length of a typical warranty, and inside fifteen.

The grey band is the shop price. It overlaps the gold bars, not the green ones. At today's prices a battery repays itself inside fifteen years, and inside ten only at the bottom of the range with a car. A quote under €3,800 for 10 kWh, or under €2,600 for 5 kWh, changes that.

A bigger roof changes it less than you might expect. We also ran an eight-panel home, and the ten-year price falls by only about €250. The battery is limited by how much the house uses in the evening, not by how much the roof makes at noon. At 3 cents export, if feed-in fees take half, every price in the chart rises by about 15%.

Option three: both

They add up, because timing works on the daytime loads and the battery on the evening ones. In the Amsterdam home with a car, a 5 kWh battery at €4,000 plus the habit repays itself in 7.8 years and is €1,274 ahead at ten. That is the strongest result in the Dutch runs. Without a car the same pair takes 10.5 years, and the 10 kWh battery plus the habit 13.7.

The small battery does better than the large one once the habit is in place. The roof rarely has 10 kWh spare to put in, so the second half of a 10 kWh battery is paid for and seldom filled.

Winter is the problem a battery does not solve

Amsterdam has 318 days a year with a mean temperature below 18 degrees. The roof makes five times more in June than in December, and the heating demand runs the other way. The house in our model heats with gas, so none of that touches its electricity bill. Put a heat pump in and the biggest electric load of the year lands in the months the battery is emptiest. A battery moves June's lunchtime to June's evening. It does not move June to January.

So what should you do

Everything above is at 26 cents in and 6 cents out. A higher export rate stretches the battery's wait and a lower one shortens it. A dynamic contract changes the question, because the battery can then buy cheap night power as well as store the roof, and the calculator does not model that.

Check your own house

Your tariff, your quote and the loads you can move are all different from the two homes above. The calculator below runs the same model on your own numbers. Set the export rate to 26 cents to see net metering, and to your supplier's 2027 rate to see what follows. Nothing is stored, and the only thing that leaves the page is a map coordinate used to fetch the weather archive for your location.