Minister: netting scheme for solar panels will disappear as of January 2021

The Minister of Economic Affairs and Climate, Eric Wiebes, informed the House of Representatives that the current netting scheme for solar panels will continue for another year. This means that the current scheme will be exchanged for the feed-in subsidy from 1 January 2021.

In the letter to the House of Representatives, Minister Wiebes says that in recent months, after consultation with the parties involved, it has become apparent that the elaboration of the new, replacement regulation is ‘more complex than initially thought’. The minister reports that various parties have expressed ‘their serious concerns’. Based on these concerns, Wiebes says it is no longer feasible to introduce the new scheme as of 1 January 2020, as was originally intended. He has in mind 1 January 2021 as the new start date.

This concerns the exchange of the netting arrangement for the feed-in subsidy. Under the netting scheme, the energy generated by the solar panels is netted one-to-one with the annual consumption. This will eventually be exchanged for the feed-in subsidy, whereby a fee is paid for the power that is fed back into the electricity grid.

In practice, this will mean that owners of solar panels will receive less in return; Minister Kamp, Wiebes’ predecessor, called the netting scheme in 2017 a ‘relatively expensive scheme in terms of euros per ton of CO2 emissions avoided’. Wiebes reiterated this in a letter from June 2018. In it, he also stated that if the policy remains unchanged, the payback period is expected to fall to approximately four years in 2025. payback period is based on which individuals are willing to invest in solar panels.