Plug-in batteries lead the Dutch market. And nobody is counting them.

There are four numbers in the Dutch battery statistics for 2025.

89,200. 30,000. 22,500. And 20,596.

Same year, same country, same product. Add them up and nothing adds up. Put them side by side and you are comparing things that are not comparable.

Not a calculation error. Four different yardsticks.

This is the written version that goes with the video, with every number, source and calculation included. If you only want to know what to buy, scroll to "What I would do myself". If you want to know how fast this market is actually moving, start here.

Four numbers, four yardsticks

Sold is not the same as in use. Between that 30,000 and 22,500 sit modules still in their boxes, units exported, and modules sold separately as expansions to an existing system. Registered is something else again, because that is an administrative act at the grid operator.

What you can take from it: the market grew from roughly 24,000 new batteries in 2024 to 89,200 in 2025. Almost four times as many. For the residential segment DNE itself puts it at plus 260 percent. At the end of 2025 there was nearly 3 gigawatt-hours of storage sitting in Dutch homes, half of it installed in that single year.

The number that does not exist

Now the interesting one: of all those batteries, 20,596 made it into the official register.

Since 7 May 2024, every battery of 0.8 kilowatt and up must be reported through energieleveren.nl, after which it lands in the CERES register. Mandatory. Except that obligation starts at 0.8 kW.

And there is the gap. A plug-in battery that feeds back at 800 watts sits right under that threshold. Legally exempt. Not sneaky, not illegal, not "required but nobody bothers". Simply outside the scheme.

On top of that structural exemption comes low compliance. Of the batteries that do fall under the obligation, EDSN estimated in mid-2024 that perhaps only about half had been reported. That estimate is two years old now and a registration wave is under way, so coverage is probably better than it was. Better is still not complete.

Statistics Netherlands (CBS) is the clearest on this. At the end of 2024 CBS counted 76,000 residential battery systems in the Netherlands, while CERES stood at roughly 5,000 in September 2024. The CBS conclusion: the register is not yet suitable as a basis for the total market.

The register stood at 56,570 batteries in mid-2026, together good for roughly 813 megawatts, as of 6 July 2026. A floor, not a count.

How fast this is moving

The monthly figures for 2025 show what happened in a single year.

So in the first quarter of 2026 nearly as many plug-in batteries crossed the counter as in all of 2025. Retailers interviewed by NOS went from five to ten units a day to well over a hundred a day.

The plug-in share of the new market is now above 50 percent. Which makes the plug-in variant no longer an entry-level category. It has become the default purchase.

Why the Netherlands specifically

Three things come together here.

The Netherlands has the highest amount of solar per capita in the world. The installed base is already there, so storage is the logical next step.

On 1 January 2027 the Dutch net metering scheme (salderingsregeling) ends completely. No phase-out path. This is law: the Senate voted in favour on 17 December 2024, after the earlier phase-out proposal had actually been rejected in February 2024. An important nuance that often gets lost: net metering disappears, payment for exported power does not. A legal minimum of 50 percent of the bare supply tariff remains in place until 2030. Exporting simply becomes worth clearly less than using it yourself.

And then the part the net metering era let everyone ignore: self-consumption. Without a battery you use roughly 30 percent of your own solar power, the rest goes to the grid. With a battery that rises to 60 to 80 percent. Milieu Centraal lands at around 60 percent. Research by CE Delft for Vereniging Eigen Huis put concrete numbers on it: a household with 12 panels goes from 33 to 68 percent with a 5 kWh battery.

The third point is the dullest and probably the most important. A plug-in battery needs no electrician, no work in the fuse box, no quote and no waiting list. You unpack it and put it in a wall socket. That removes the single biggest barrier a fixed system does have, and it is exactly what the trade press is worried about: the installer channel is being partly bypassed.

Price is the real argument

Not payback time. Entry price.

Two things stand out.

The smallest is the most expensive. That 2.56 kWh Marstek costs almost twice as much per kWh as the 5.12 kWh model from the same brand. Trade capacity away to save money and you pay more per stored kilowatt-hour, not less.

And the gap to a fixed system is a factor of three to four per kWh. That is what is driving this segment. Not because the plug-in pays for itself faster (spoiler: it does not, see below), but because you start at €1,200 instead of €4,500.

On the wider price trend: system prices including installation fell from roughly €1,000 to €1,500 per kWh in 2023 to roughly €475 to €900 in 2026. Broadly a halving in three years. Globally, BloombergNEF recorded bare lithium-ion packs at $108 per kWh in 2025, a record low. But extending that line into 2027 is a projection, not a fact. Some manufacturers expect plus 10 percent in 2026 because of the demand peak ahead of the net metering deadline. Waiting for a guaranteed price drop is not a strategy.

The 2026 wave

Between February and April 2026 a release wave arrived that completes the picture.

Look at what is happening to power and capacity here. The Anker Solarbank Max AC starts at 7 kWh and runs to 42 kWh. That is no longer a balcony battery, that is a house installation you unbox yourself. At the other end of the scale sits the Marstek Venus B: 2 kWh, 8.6 centimetres thin, IP65, wall mounted. Same category, a factor of 21 difference in capacity.

Part of this list is announced or in pre-order. Prices and delivery dates move every quarter, so check them before you order.

The second tier: the installer comes back

Alongside the consumer class, something new appeared in April 2026. Zendure launched the SolarFlow Mix series: 8 kWh base rising to 50 kWh, 4 kW AC, controlled by a PowerHub. Whole-home. And hardwired, so with a qualified electrician in the fuse box.

At the same time it went the other way too. Growatt was an installer brand until this year, systems put in by a fitter. The AURA 5000 is their first consumer plug-in.

Both movements at once tell the same story: the segment is mature enough to have its own tiers. A plug-in tier for people who want to start on their own, and a pro tier for people who want to go further than a wall socket allows.

800 watts is not what you think

This is where nearly every discussion goes wrong. Three numbers are in circulation and all three measure something different.

So those 800 watts have nothing to do with a cable getting hot. It is the European grid code threshold: a generation or storage unit from 0.8 kW up to 1 MW is "significant" (type A) and must meet the RfG requirements. Below it you fall outside them. Above that line you are not exporting illegally, you are being regulated.

The physical safety limit sits a factor of three to four higher, at the circuit and the socket. Do not confuse the two, even though the debate happens to share a number.

On legality itself, because this myth keeps circulating: there is no law banning a home battery with a plug. NEN1010 is a standard about how to install safely, cable thickness, circuit protection, earth leakage. Not a law and not a ban. An installer may fit a separate, correctly calculated circuit, and a battery on that circuit may run at full power within the specs of that circuit and the main fuse. The grey area is exclusively about unrestricted export through a shared socket without its own circuit.

Safety, with the right source attached

The Dutch fire service published guidance on plug-in home batteries on 7 April 2026. It is about incorrect use and incorrect placement, not about an inherently faulty product.

The cells in nearly all plug-in batteries are LFP (lithium iron phosphate), named across the market as the most stable chemistry for this application.

One attribution that often goes wrong: the requirement for IEC/EN 62619 plus CE marking comes from insurer and industry guidance, not from the fire service statement. It is a good thing to check when buying. Just do not credit it to the fire service.

What it actually saves, calculated honestly

Now the part that makes sellers go quiet.

The assumption doing the rounds is that a €1,200 plug-in battery pays for itself much faster than a €4,500 fixed system, because it is so much cheaper. That reasoning does not hold. Savings scale with capacity and self-consumption, not with purchase price.

My calculation for a 5.12 kWh plug-in battery, after 1 January 2027, with every assumption stated:

That lands neatly inside what independent research finds. Solar365 ran the numbers in June 2026 on over 1,300 real quarter-hourly measurement series and came out at 6 to 7 years in favourable cases for a 5 kWh plug-in battery around €1,100. A fixed system with a dynamic contract sits in the same range, 7 to 10 years. Across all households the spread runs from 6.5 to 22 years.

Conclusion: the plug-in battery does not win on payback time. It wins on entry cost. €1,200 you might recover in six years is a completely different risk from €4,500 you might recover in eight, even when the return percentage is comparable.

One more number from that same research, and it is the most expensive advice in this article: at roughly 3 kWh of overnight consumption, anything above 4 kWh adds almost nothing. Buying bigger than your night-time load produces no extra saving, only an extra invoice.

Dynamic contracts and control

If you want to get the most out of it, you pair the battery with a dynamic energy contract. That is where the biggest shift of 2026 sits.

Frank Energie charges €0.01 per kWh in storage costs, the lowest in the Netherlands, and offers an open API with real quarter-hourly EPEX data. Zonneplan is the second supplier with a genuine quarter-hourly API and its own ecosystem.

Tibber now sells the EcoFlow STREAM Pro officially bundled with the Pulse P1, including direct charge and discharge control. That information is new: until early 2026 EcoFlow was still on the "not officially supported" list.

For Marstek, Zendure and Anker that is still the case right now. Control runs through Home Assistant or your own automation. Works fine, it just requires a willingness to tinker. Factor that into your choice if you would rather not.

What I could not confirm

While researching this, some claims did not survive. They are here, because leaving them out would make the picture look cleaner than it is.

"Zendure Hub 4000 / Hub 5000, installers only." Does not exist under that name. Zendure's hubs are the Hub 2000, the Hub 1200 and the PowerHub. The numbers 4000 and 5000 belong to the SolarFlow Mix series, and that one genuinely is installer work. So the underlying claim holds, the product name does not.

"A 3.0 kWh plug-in battery from around €900." No brand sells one. The confusion comes from "Venus E 3.0", where 3.0 is the generation, not the capacity. That model is 5.12 kWh. The cheapest realistic entry point is the Growatt NEXA 2000 at 2 kWh around €675.

"Marstek Venus E 3.0: over 8,000 units sold." That figure comes from retailer copy, not from an independent audit. That the model is among the best sellers is broadly documented. The exact number is not.

"Anker Solix is bigger in Germany than in the Netherlands." Plausible, but I found no hard market share figure for both countries. So it stands here as an impression, not as a number.

And the most important caveat of all: the headline market figures in this article (89,200, 30,000, the monthly series, Q1 2026) effectively all trace back to one analyst, Rolf Heynen of DNE Research and Sunergy. There is no second independent count of the same standard. CBS confirms the thesis that the market is undercounted, but has no better source of its own. So read those numbers as the best available estimate, not as a census.

What I would do myself

And the honest summary: if someone tells you a plug-in battery pays for itself in three years, that is not true. Count on six to nine years, depending on your consumption pattern and your contract. The reason to get one anyway is that you start at €1,200 instead of €4,500, and that after 2027 every kilowatt-hour you use yourself is worth more than every kilowatt-hour you export.

The video that goes with this

The accessible version of this story is on Jay's Desk. The four numbers, the 0.8 kilowatt catch and the honest verdict are all on screen there, in about thirteen minutes. This article is the complete version with the calculations and the sources.

Thuisbatterij met stekker: de nieuwe nummer 1 van Nederland (in Dutch)

Related articles

• From ThuisbatterijNederland to Jay's Desk - why this channel exists and what changes
• End of net metering 2027: what to do now - the full timeline and three household scenarios
• Home battery too big? The honest explanation - why a bigger battery barely delivers more
• Is a home battery worth it in 2026? - the full ROI calculation step by step
• Home batteries from China and AliExpress - cheap alternatives and what to watch for

Methodology

So you can check the work.

Reference date. All figures, prices and compatibility information were verified on 24 July 2026, against the sources listed at the bottom. Prices and delivery dates in this segment move every quarter, so check them yourself before ordering.

Market figures. 89,200 total and 87,600 residential for 2025 come from DNE Research, published via Solarmagazine and Solar365. The 30,000 plug-in versus 37,000 fixed split, the monthly series and the Q1 2026 figure come from Sunergy/Heynen via Solarmagazine. Registration figures (20,596 in 2025, 56,570 as of 6 July 2026) come from CERES via Solarmagazine and Solar365. All three series are estimates based on industry inventory, not an official count. See also the single-source caveat above.

Savings calculation. Assumptions: 5.12 kWh nominal, 90 percent depth of discharge, 75 percent round-trip efficiency (the plug-in range is 70 to 80 percent, against 88 to 95 percent for a fixed system), 250 to 300 full cycles per year, supply tariff €0.28 per kWh including taxes, export payment €0.06 per kWh (the legal minimum of 50 percent of the bare supply tariff until 2030). The supply tariff is my assumption, not a sourced value. Put your own tariff in and the result shifts with it: saving = shifted kWh × (your supply tariff minus your export payment). The calculation covers solar shifting without active price arbitrage. With a dynamic contract and active control the return is higher, but then the cycle count changes too, and with it the lifespan.

Arithmetic checks. 16 A × 230 V = 3,680 W. 10 A × 230 V = 2,300 W. The 0.8 kW registration threshold comes from article 5 of Regulation (EU) 2016/631 and is a grid code threshold, not a load limit for a wall socket.

New models. Anker Solarbank Max AC, the Zendure SolarFlow 2400 line and Mix 4000 series, the EcoFlow STREAM gen 2 line, Growatt AURA 5000 and Marstek Venus B were checked against manufacturer pages plus at least one independent source. Several of them are announced or in pre-order at the time of writing. Delivery dates and prices may well have shifted by the time you read this.

The video that goes with this. youtube.com/watch?v=R71LX7wWxBY, Jay's Desk, in Dutch. The figures quoted in it come from the same 24 July 2026 fact check as this article.

What is not in here. Payback times per brand, because those depend entirely on your own consumption pattern. Affiliate links, because there are none. A recommendation for one specific brand, because the differences inside the 5 kWh class are currently smaller than the differences between households.

Sources

Market and adoption

1. Solarmagazine - DNE Research: home battery market growing explosively due to end of net metering (23 December 2025)
2. Solar365 - Over 56,000 batteries registered on energieleveren.nl (6 July 2026)
3. Solarmagazine - The rise of the plug-in battery: is the installer missing the boat? (5 March 2026)
4. Solarmagazine - Almost 20,000 plug-in batteries sold in the first quarter (17 April 2026)
5. NOS - Plug-in battery increasingly popular (7 April 2025)
6. Solarmagazine - Grid operators registered 20,596 new batteries last year (7 January 2026)
7. CBS - Development of statistics on batteries for electricity storage (19 December 2025)

Registration and regulation

8. EDSN - Registering home batteries on EnergieLeveren.nl
9. Netbeheer Nederland - Report home batteries on energieleveren.nl
10. Regulation (EU) 2016/631 (NC RfG), article 5 - EUR-Lex CELEX:32016R0631 (14 April 2016)
11. ACM - Decision on the boundary between new and existing units and installations
12. Government Gazette 2021, 14714 - Analysis of Regulation (EU) 2016/631 (NC RfG)
13. Dutch Senate - Net Metering Termination Act (36.611) adopted (17 December 2024)
14. Dutch government - Net metering ends from 1 January 2027
15. Netbeheer Nederland - Abolition of net metering: Senate votes in favour

Installation and safety

16. Thuisbatterijblog.nl - Is a home battery with a plug actually allowed in the Netherlands?
17. StekkerDeal - Installing a home battery: socket, separate circuit or fixed connection?
18. Thuisbatterijmetstekker.nl - Installing a plug-in battery yourself: is it allowed and how (NEN1010)?
19. IOTDomotica - Connecting a plug-in home battery safely
20. P1meter.nl - Does a plug-in home battery need its own circuit?
21. Solar Garant - Connecting a home battery to the fuse box, safely per NEN 1010
22. Brandweer.nl - Home battery with a plug? How to prevent fire risk (7 April 2026)
23. Solar Garant - LFP home battery fire risk: facts and safety
24. Slimster - Is a home battery safe?

Prices, models and returns

25. energienerds.nl - Marstek Venus E 3.0 review (6 November 2025)
26. marstek.nl - Venus E 3.0 5.12 kWh product page
27. solargarant.nl - Sessy costs 2026
28. thuisbatterijgids.net - Growatt AURA 5000 and NEXA 2000
29. thuisbatterijenhulp.nl - Best plug-in battery 2026
30. p1meter.nl - These brands are introducing a plug-in home battery in 2026
31. Anker SOLIX NL - Solarbank Max AC (A17E2)
32. pv-magazine - Anker Solix launches 7 kWh plug-in battery targeting rooftop solar retrofits (9 April 2026)
33. Energy-Storage.news - Zendure launches new SolarFlow storage systems for Europe (10 February 2026)
34. Energy-Storage.news - Zendure launches whole-home capable SolarFlow Mix Series (23 April 2026)
35. zendure.com - SolarFlow Mix Series
36. Notebookcheck - EcoFlow Stream 2: successor delivers up to 5,000 W
37. EcoFlow EU - STREAM Series datasheet
38. pv-magazine - Growatt launches 5 kWh AC-coupled balcony storage system (3 February 2026)
39. energienerds.nl - Preview Marstek Venus B: ultra-thin 2 kWh plug-in (10 March 2026)
40. Zonneplan - Home battery price development
41. Solar Garant - Home battery price development
42. Milieu Centraal - Home battery: storing solar energy
43. Solar365 - Research: home batteries increase self-consumption by 30 percent (CE Delft and Vereniging Eigen Huis) (11 February 2026)
44. Solar365 - Research: from 2027 a home battery only pays off in select cases (11 June 2026)
45. duurzaamthuislab.nl - Dynamic energy contracts and home batteries 2026
46. StekkerDeal - Tibber: Grid Rewards, Homevolt and Home Assistant
47. Stroomvoorspeller.nl - Comparing dynamic contracts 2026