Four energy companies now charging customers to push solar power onto the grid

Four energy companies are now charging more for returning solar power to the grid than the compensation consumers receive for the electricity their solar panels generate, the Volkskrant reports based on a study of all Dutch suppliers by energy comparison site Keuze.nl. The price comparison site speaks of a new trend.

Energy companies pay customers for every kilowatt hour that they feed into the electricity grid through the netting scheme. Customers can deduct their generated electricity from the electricity they take from the grid at other times. But the netting scheme has become increasingly expensive for energy companies, who have to buy a lot of expensive electricity in the winter to cover the cheap electricity customers push onto the grid in the summer.

So, recently, energy companies have started charging customers for pushing solar power onto the grid. “Until now, there was always a small plus,” Geert Wirken of Keuze.nl told the Volkskrant. But since this week, Innova Energie, Mega Energie, UnitedConsumers, and Pure Energie - all relatively small suppliers - charge more for each kilowatt hour (kWh) than they pay for it. It’s not huge amounts - Wirken estimates that the additional costs should run below 50 euros per year - but it is against parliament’s motion in May that consumers should receive “reasonable compensation” for returned solar power.

UnitedConsumers currently pays a feed-in fee of 5 cents per kWh, while customers have to pay 10.3 cents for the same generated kWh. In total, UnitedConsumers customers, therefore, pay 5.3 cents for every kWh that goes into the grid above the netting limit, according to Keuze.nl.

Thom van Es of Pure Energy told the newspaper that customers will only pay for pushing energy onto the grid if they produce much more energy than they consume in a year. “There are still many scenarios in which customers remain below the netting limit and still get money back for the energy they generate.”

“The netting scheme is really not sustainable, and the solution is now being left to the market,” Van Es continued. The market came up with this construction. “It is not that we earn more money from this, as was also shown by a recent study by the supervisory authority ACM.”

Consumers who want to pay as little feed-in costs as possible should try to consume as much of the electricity they generate themselves as possible, Wirken said. He added that consumers should not focus blindly on the feed-in costs. Many factors determine how much money someone spends on energy per year. For example, some providers offer high cashback for long-term customers, while others offer lower electricity prices.