The new government has decided: net metering to stop in 2027

Prime minister Schoof's new cabinet has presented its government programme for the coming cabinet period, which includes the following sentence: The net metering mechanism for small consumers will be terminated as of 1 January 2027. From then on prosumers will receive a 'reasonable compensation' for all electricity fed in.

This means that the saga about the end of the net metering scheme has progressed a bit further, but it is still far from over. The coalition parties do have a majority in the House of Representatives (Tweede Kamer), but not in the Senate (Eerste Kamer), so there is still a chance of a hitch occurring along the way. A bill has been submitted for the abolition of the net metering scheme with the concise title ‘Amendment of some laws to implement the termination of the net metering mechasism for electricity and some technical amendments’ (36611-2). For those interested: you can download it here (in Dutch).

Never negative

There is still some confusion about the term ‘reasonable compensation’: who determines what is reasonable? However, what is very clear in the bill is that the compensation can never be negative. In other words: if you feed power back into the grid, you will never have to pay for it, even if the power price is negative at that time. Switching off the inverters is therefore no longer something to worry about!

The abolition of the netting scheme will inevitably lead to solar panels becoming slightly less attractive financially. The payback period increases and the profit on the system decreases slightly, but despite this a solar power installation remains a very profitable investment for most people. However, the challenge for the solar panel owner is now mainly to increase their percentage of self-consumption, for example from 30% to 60%. As far as Zonnefabriek is concerned, that is an excellent objective: challenge accepted!

Increasing self-consumption: Step 1

Step one on this path is to have a clear idea of ​​how high your current self-consumption is exactly. For this we need two numbers: your feed-in and your generation. For the feed-in, you need to look up the annual bill from your energy supplier. Look up the last annual statement and add up all the amounts of feed-in power ('teruglevering') in kWh. In the example below this is 545 + 1348 = 1893 kWh in 1 year, from October 7, 2021 to October 8, 2022

You will find the total feed-in energy in kWh on your energy supplier's annual statement

Next, you need to look up the generation of the solar panels for approximately the same period, for example for the year 2022 (it does not have to the exact same period as long as it is the same duration, for example 12 months). You can use the 'My Zonnefabriek' app for this, or the app of your inverter manufacturer ('SMA Energy' or 'SolarEdge' for example). In the example below we use the 'My Zonnefabriek app': go to 'opbrengst' (yield) and to the 'totaal' tab and click on the bar for the year in question. A pop-up will appear with the total generation for that year (here for example it was 2419 kWh in 2022)

You can find the total generation over a year using your app or monitoring portal, such as here for 2022

Now divide these two numbers by each other: the feed-in divided by the total generation. That should give a number between 0 and 1. You multiply this by 100 to get a percentage: that is the percentage of the generated power that was fed into the grid. Finally, you subtract this percentage from 100%: now you have your self-consumption.

In our example that gives: return divided by generation is equal to 1893 / 2419 = 0.78. Multiplying by 100% gives 78%. Subtracting this from 100 gives 100 - 78 = 22%. This customer therefore had a self-consumption of only 22% in this particular year: we're going to do something about that!

Self-consumption is what remains of the generation after the feed-in part has been deducted

Increasing self-consumption: next steps

Now that we know what the current self-consumption is, we need to see how we can increase this figure. Our goal is 60%, but that doesn't have to be all at once. After all, we still have more than 2 years ahead of us before the net metering system will (probably) disappear.

Of course we'll start with the low-hanging fruit: only turning on consumer appliances when the sun is shining. That means that we have to adjust our habits a little, for example by not turning on the dishwasher in the evening after dinner, but rather the next day during daylight. The same applies to appliances such as the washing machine and dryer.

Next let's take a look at chargers: Electric bicycle? Make sure it gets charged during the day, and not at night. If necessary, you can use smart sockets to ensure that charging can only take place when the sun is shining.

And speaking of charging: do you have an electric car with a socket? Then charge it as little as possible after sunset. That's easy to do if you have a smart car charger that only pumps your surplus solar energy into the car battery. With a ‘dumb’ charging station, you have to be careful to only plug it in when there is a lot of sun, and to unplug it in time when the sun disappears.

And then of course there is the heat pump: with a heat pump boiler you can easily increase your own consumption by 10% or more, as we discussed in this article.

Home battery storage systems make the picture complete

As the icing on the cake, you can also have a home battery installed. Not the cheapest solution, but one that does immediately increase your self-consumption by leaps and bounds. We have written a lot about home batteries over the years and you can look up the details of various products on the product page.

Hopefully you have already realised that your solar panels generate a lot of power: now it is all about getting the most out of them for your own energy consumption. It starts with knowing how high your current self-consumption and then gradually increasing it. Zonnefabriek would be happy to help you in your quest: take a look at our product pages for suggestions or contact us for a no-obligation consultation.