Hey everyone, this is a topic that's been on my mind to write a post about for some weeks now and coincides with a new energy contract that starts for my family today, it's something else than only making Splinterlands posts - something I want to try get better at and hopefully to diversify my account this way.

The Changing Energy Landscape in The Netherlands, intro.

The energy world in The Netherlands is undergoing a major transformation. For decades, natural gas was the backbone of our heating and energy systems, but that is rapidly changing as we shift towards a more sustainable, electric-powered future. Heat pumps, solar panels, and electric vehicles are becoming commonplace, gradually replacing traditional gas-powered solutions.

But it’s not just how we use energy that’s changing — it’s also how we pay for it. Fixed energy tariffs, once the norm, are giving way to dynamic pricing. With dynamic tariffs, energy costs fluctuate throughout the day, driven by real-time supply and demand. This shift allows consumers to save money by using electricity during off-peak hours when prices are lower.

This change isn’t just about cost; it’s about creating a smarter, greener energy system. By aligning consumption with renewable energy availability, dynamic pricing supports the integration of solar and wind energy, helping The Netherlands move closer to its sustainability goals.

The problems and solutions.

Our energy network is getting more and more congested, and it's happening fast. With companies and households making their transition from expensive natural gas to, well... I can't say cheap electricity but it's less expensive.
The Russian - Ukraine war has accelerated this change a lot, when the war started and the market panicked, gas prices sky rocketed, forcing people to think about how they will need to handle their own energy situation.

In the old days, a household would just agree on a fixed price with the energy company for one to five years. The problem this gives is that there is no incentive whatsoever to plan our energy consumption and to make it even worse (I'm now talking from the congestion side of view) we could compensate our total electricity usage in A YEAR with what our solar panels have delivered back to the grid.

So even when I was using all my electricity in the evening, when there isn't any sun, I could 'use' my solar powered electricity my solar panels delivered in sunny days in the past years, this was done to promote solar panels, so we made good use of this, using chances like this are very important to save a lot of money, but you also need some luck every now and then, and we had a lot of luck with our last fixed energy contract, more on that later.

The solution to this problem is easy but debated: end the netting agreement, called 'salderings regeling' in my country, and the government has agreed on to end this in 2027.
Without this agreement, people still have two choices, go the old way and have a fixed price (but the energy company will require a premium for future price changes) or move with the market and use dynamic prices, since I don't like changes I needed some time to get used to this idea but I still think this is the right move.

This displays where the congestion problems are at it's highest, I'm lucky to be in a 'good' area.

Fixed price just before the start of the war.

So we got REALLY damn lucky, our old energy contract expired in December 2021, and we needed to renew it and we accepted the new prices our energy company offered us - this would be a fixed price for the next three years. Little did we know of the war would start within two months and change everything, without getting too much in to this, prices surged and for a while it wasn't even possible to negotiate a fixed price with the energy companies anymore.

With our new contract we still had a good gas price but this would end in three years, time to make preparations to change from gas to electricity where we could.
In the coming months, we replaced the gas stove for an induction cooking plate and we changed from using the central heating to heat the living room to heat it with an Air Conditioning unit since we were only used to heat our living room anyway and not the upper floors.

Gas is now only used for showering, but I don't like the change to a heat pump for the time being and hopefully in the future there will be a better solution.
With these changes we were able to cut our gas usage by 80 - 90% but of course this meant our use of electricity was way up because of this, which was fine because of the fixed low price of around 22 - 25 euro cents for every KiloWattHour used.

The change from fixed to dynamic prices.

Three years later and our contract we started in 2021 ended, exactly today when I am writing this blog post - December 15 2024.

So we had some options, to continue on the old way with somewhat increased fixed prices: 10 - 15% for electricity and 30% for gas but the big change was our current energy company Eneco changed the way they will pay me for unused energy delivered back to the grid, in my old contract I was earning the same amount I was paying for every KWH, now they would pay 14 cents but would tax me 11 cents to kind of force people to use the solar energy or save it in personal (expensive) batteries for use later in the day.
So, for every KWH I didn't use I went from 22 - 25 cents to 3 cents.

Bye Eneco - Hello Zonneplan!

Back in 2019, a company called Zonneplan, installed our solar panels and back then they were just doing that, but they quickly grew and now they have become an energy supplier as well, quickly attracting new customers with the modern way of delivering energy with dynamic pricing.

They guarantee to never tax on delivering energy back to the grid, and because my solar panels are installed by them, they can even shut them off to help solve net congestion.

In the app I can see the actual price for electricity changing every hour, a gas price is set for the day.

Today it's a sunday, in the winter there isn't a lot of solar energy, the highest price for today is 26 cents, in the summer months prices will likely be lower with average prices last year at around 22 cents.

It's even possible to have negative prices in the summer, where you can get PAID to use electricity although this is a rare phenomenon, but it would be a great moment to cool the living room with our A/C unit! 😁

These dynamic prices required a whole new mind set that will take a while to get used to, when to start the dish washer or washing machine or other high consuming appliances and not to just start them whenever we want like we used to in the past.

Actual view in the app earlier this week, prices were a lot higher then.

When I look at the chart with average electricity prices over the last twelve months, we can see it was a good thing to have a dynamic contract (black line) in favor of a contract with a fixed price (dotted grey line), people who would plan their energy usage in a clever way were paying an even lower average (green line).

Conclusion

Times are definitely changing, and the decisions we make now will prove to be the right thing or not over time, I hope this was a good move but time will tell if I was right!
And, this is only seen from a financial point of view but this is definitely the better way to use energy now we are incentivized to turn on appliances when the sun is actually powering our solar panels.

The energy market is VERY different across the globe so please let me know how this affects you and what you pay, I think this is very interesting!