Home battery in Hoofddorp

Start with the sentence that gets left out of most offers. A battery moves a kilowatt-hour from the cheap column into the expensive one. What it earns per stored unit is therefore not the retail price of electricity: it is the difference between what you pay for a kilowatt-hour and what you would have been paid for exporting it. Costing a battery at the full retail rate overstates its return by roughly a factor of two, and that is the single most common error in the offers people bring us.

The reason that difference exists at all is a rule change with a date on it. The Dutch net-metering scheme, the salderingsregeling, ends completely on 1 January 2027, with no phase-out and no transitional year. Until 31 December 2026 every exported kilowatt-hour still cancels an imported one. From 1 January they are two separate lines. Export earns a feed-in payment, which by law until 2030 must be at least half the bare delivery tariff, that is, half the rate before energy tax and VAT. After 2030 that floor lapses and only a reasonableness test remains, with zero as the lower bound. Feed-in costs stay, supervised by the regulator so they cover no more than actual costs.

What a battery can move is the consumption that falls outside daylight hours: cooking, laundry, lighting, the evening in general. Look at what you use between six in the evening and seven the next morning on a mild day. That figure, in kilowatt-hours, is roughly the usable capacity worth buying. A household on 3,000 kilowatt-hours a year will never fill a fifteen kilowatt-hour battery and never empty it either.

Then the cycles. A home battery in this climate does not manage 365 full cycles. For four months there is no surplus to fill it with, and in March and October the surplus is too small for a full charge. Plan on 250 to 320 usable cycles, and on a round-trip efficiency of 85 to 90 percent: ten kilowatt-hours in, about nine back out.

So: usable capacity, times cycles, times the tariff gap. Take a five kilowatt-hour usable battery, 300 cycles and a gap of eighteen cents, and you are at roughly 270 euros a year. Installed complete, a battery that size typically costs 3,500 to 5,500 euros. That is thirteen to twenty years, longer than the warranty on nearly every battery currently sold.

Which gives the plain conclusion, and it belongs before the exceptions rather than after them: for an average household with panels and nothing else, a home battery does not repay itself on the arithmetic alone.

They stack, and any two of them together usually decide it. A large surplus, because a full roof on a modest household pushes a lot of units out at the low rate. A heat pump or an EV charger, because both raise evening demand and so give the battery more cycles to work with. A dynamic tariff, because the battery can then also earn the spread between an expensive evening and a cheap night on top of the import-export gap. And feed-in costs that scale with exported volume, since you do not pay those on units that never leave the house.

If none of that describes your household, the cheapest storage is rescheduling: dishwasher and washing machine during the day, the water heater on a timer. It costs nothing and it earns against exactly the same tariff gap.

The grid in this region genuinely is under pressure, but not on the side most people assume. Liander has published congestion research for the Haarlemmermeer area on the consumption side: the scarcity is in what comes off the grid, not in what goes onto it. And households and small business users are not placed on a waiting list for export at all.

The practical consequence is worth stating plainly. Here, a battery is not a way around an export restriction you do not have. What it does do is flatten your own evening peak, and that starts to count the moment a heat pump and a car charger sit behind the same main fuse. For that problem a battery is one of two answers. The other is a heavier connection, which in this area means a waiting time and a standing charge that continues for as long as the connection exists.

Usable capacity rather than nominal, since only the first ever passes through your meter. Round-trip efficiency. Warranty expressed in cycles or in total throughput rather than in years. Whether it does anything during a power cut, which most grid-tied systems do not. What temperature its location reaches in January. And whether the inverter is hybrid or the battery is coupled on the AC side.