Solar panels in Hoofddorp

The Netherlands has run a scheme called the salderingsregeling: every kilowatt-hour you exported to the grid was simply subtracted from every kilowatt-hour you imported, at the same price. Your meter effectively ran backwards. That scheme stops on 1 January 2027. Not tapering, not in steps: it ends outright, and until 31 December 2026 it still applies in full.

From that date, import and export are settled separately. Power you use the moment you generate it saves you the retail price you pay, energy tax and VAT included. Power that leaves the house earns a feed-in payment, and the law puts a floor under that until 2030: at least half the bare delivery tariff, meaning the rate before any tax is added. Suppliers may also charge feed-in costs, the terugleverkosten, and those do not go away.

Take your annual statement and find two figures. The all-in price per kilowatt-hour that you pay is the first. The bare delivery rate in your contract, halved, is the second. On almost any Dutch bill those two sit at least a factor of two apart. That gap is the reason the shape of your consumption now matters more than the size of your roof, and it is why "how many panels fit" has stopped being the same question as "how many panels should I buy".

An installation in this country yields roughly 850 to 950 kilowatt-hours per kilowatt-peak per year, assuming the roof plane faces south at a pitch between thirty and forty degrees. An east-west layout gets about 85 percent of that, but spreads what it does produce across a longer day, which after 2027 is worth more than the headline figure suggests. A north-facing plane sits near sixty percent and rarely repays anything.

That orientation factor belongs in the quote. A yield in kilowatt-hours without the orientation it was calculated on is a number with no roof underneath it. Ask what comes off it again, too: a chimney, a dormer or a neighbour's aerial costs more than the patch it shades, because panels are wired in series and the weakest one sets the pace for the row.

What is different in the polder is not shade but wind. Haarlemmermeer is flat and open, and on a flat roof panels stand on a ballasted frame rather than being bolted into a rafter. The edges of that field catch the most wind and get heavier ballast or extra anchoring than the middle. That is load on your roof structure, so the quote should state it in kilos per square metre.

In July 2025 the Dutch transport inspectorate, the ILT, asked Haarlemmermeer to enforce against glare from a solar park near the Polderbaan runway. Schiphol won the case, and 78,000 of that park's 230,000 panels have to go. Since then the municipality grants permits on the condition that panels are cadmium-free and deeply textured. No other municipality in the Netherlands imposes it.

The two halves do different work. Cadmium-free rules out thin-film panels based on cadmium telluride: a materials question, not an optical one. The ordinary crystalline panels that go on houses contain no cadmium and already comply. Deep texturing is the optical half: a coarsely structured glass surface scatters the reflection in every direction instead of returning it as a beam, so a pilot on approach sees a pale patch rather than a flash.

Most pitched roofs in Hoofddorp need no permit at all, because panels lying in the plane of the roof are permit-free. Where the condition bites is a flat roof with a tilted array, a listed building, and any case where the municipality has to grant something for another reason. Either way, ask which glass the panel in your quote uses. It is one sentence, and it is the one question on this page your installer will not be expecting.

One checkable fact per item. The panel: make, watt-peak, glass-glass or glass-backsheet, and the product warranty stated separately from the performance warranty. The inverter: string, micro or optimisers, with its rating, which may deliberately sit ten to twenty percent below the panel total. The mounting: hooks or ballast, with the number of roof penetrations and how each is kept watertight. And the electrical work: the circuit, the cable run, and the registration with your grid operator.

What is left out matters as much. Scaffolding, a penetration through a tiled roof that already leaks, a consumer unit that has to be replaced: these are the items that surface on the invoice when they were absent from the quote.