New cabinet scraps solar panel balancing scheme as of Jan. 1, 2027

The net-metering scheme for solar panels must be completely scrapped by January 1, 2027. So write PVV, NSC, VVD and BoerBurgerBeweging (BBB) who form the new cabinet in their outline agreement.

While the 4 parties in the outline agreement "Hope, guts and pride" do not mention solar panels at all, they write in the budgetary annex that they want to completely abolish the energy-saving scheme by January 1, 2027. 

No majority in Senate
However, the abolition of netting must first be approved by both the House of Representatives and the Senate. That this will succeed is not certain because the new coalition does not have a majority in the Senate.

While newcomer BoerBurgerBeweging (BBB) holds 16 seats, the VVD (10 seats) and PVV (4 seats) actually lost a number of seats in the Upper House in the Provincial Council elections. Moreover, Pieter Omtzigt's NSC has no senators in the Upper House at all. Below the line, therefore, the new coalition holds only 30 of the 75 seats, and the green light from the Senate for ending net-metering is far from certain.

Cost item
Indeed, thanks to the BBB and Green-Left-PvdA dissenting vote, last February it was the very Senate that rejected Minister Jetten's bill to phase out the energy-saving scheme from January 1, 2025. The BBB's opposing vote was also in line with the party's election manifesto, in which the BBB announced its intention to postpone abolition of the balancing system until at least 2030 and if at least 5 million households would have recouped their solar panels.

In recent months, in response to the Senate's vote against the phase-out bill, a large number of energy companies have announced fixed feed-in tariffs to halt the rising costs of the balancing scheme for them. Moreover, voting down Jettens bill meant that the new cabinet had to look for financial cover for the hole in the budget of 2.8 billion euros that maintaining the balancing scheme will cost the central government in the period up to and including 2031. The four parties want to cover that gap by completely scrapping the balancing scheme from 2027.

Saving
PVV, NSC, VVD, and BBB, in addition, are turning over the reduction of the SME profit exemption back. With that reduction, the current outgoing administration wanted to save 93 million euros to absorb in the short term some of the cost of maintaining the balancing system.

In the outline agreement, the 4 parties that will form the new cabinet write to achieve the following savings by scrapping net-metering. Ending the net-metering scheme, by the way, is good news for the home battery, because it significantly improves the business case for storing solar energy.

End of feed-in fees?
With the elimination of net-metering, it is also likely that in the near future power companies will begin to phase out the fixed feed-in charges they introduced for consumers with solar panels. 

2 of the 3 largest energy companies operating in the Netherlands recently introduced fixed feed-in tariffs. For example, Eneco lets every solar panel customer 11.5 cents per kilowatt-hour of solar energy returned pay. Vattenfall in turn applies fixed scales of feed-in charges. Consumers with solar panels who have a variable contract or a new fixed contract will start paying them July 1.