Your grid bill is set to double, and the regulator says it cannot give you a discount

The part of your electricity bill you never think about is the part about to grow fastest. The regulator now expects the network charge on a Dutch household bill to rise by 350 to 550 euros a year in real terms by 2050, on a charge that today sits at roughly 250 euros.

That is not the price of the electricity. It is the cost of the wires, cables and offshore connections that bring it to the socket, and it is billed to every connection in the country whether you use much power or almost none.

What the regulator actually modelled

The Authority for Consumers and Markets, which sets network tariffs and is the only body allowed to, ran 4 scenarios out to 2050. In every one of them, tariffs go up for both the national grid operator TenneT and the regional operators that run the cables in your street.

The spread is wide. In the mildest scenario, tariffs to 2040 rise 79% in real terms for TenneT and 94% for the regional operators. In the harsher ones they pass 100% quickly and can go beyond 200%. The regulator’s own summary puts it as “tens to hundreds of percent”, depending on which future arrives.

For a household, the baseline in the model is about 250 euros a year in network costs, roughly what the tariffs were in 2024. Add the projected increase and the same line on the same bill lands somewhere between 600 and 800 euros a year by 2050, before inflation.

Why the reason for the increase has changed

Network charges already jumped once, and people noticed. That rise came mostly from the energy crisis: operators buy power to cover network losses and to keep reserve capacity available, and when the market price exploded, so did their costs.

The regulator expects prices to stay reasonably stable now, which means the next increase has a different engine: construction. Operators are building, and the bill for that arrives through the tariff.

One item stands out in the model. The grid at sea, which connects offshore wind farms to land, is currently barely visible in tariffs because the state subsidises the first phase. The regulator assumed the state will not subsidise the next phase. Those costs then climb fast and become an ever larger share of the base, partly because they are written off over as much as 30 years.

And because a large part of TenneT’s costs are passed down to the regional operators through what the sector calls the cascade principle, a rise at national level lands automatically on the regional bill too. That is how the energy crisis reached your street, and it is how the offshore grid will.

The awkward part: connections, not consumption

There is a structural problem buried in the arithmetic, and it decides who pays.

Regional operators bill largely per connection, not per kilowatt hour. So if households electrify heavily, using far more power without the country adding many new homes, costs rise sharply while the billable volume barely moves. The same total is then divided over roughly the same number of connections.

The regulator builds this into its model with a conversion factor of 50%: if total demand in terawatt hours doubles, billable volume only rises by half as much. Its own example is precise. A household that installs a heat pump that fits within its existing connection draws considerably more electricity, but as long as the connection is unchanged the operator cannot bill for extra volume.

Why nobody can simply hand you a discount

The obvious political answer to a rising bill is a discount for the people it hurts most. The regulator explains, at some length, why it cannot do that.

Under European law it must set tariffs on 4 principles: cost reflectivity, system efficiency, transparency and non-discrimination. In plain terms, you pay the network costs you actually cause, which the regulator calls your fair share, and users who put the same load on the network must be treated the same. It is explicitly not allowed to fold unrelated policy goals into the tariff.

The consequence is blunt. A discount for one group that is not matched by lower costs for that group is not free. Total network costs do not change, so everyone else pays the difference through higher tariffs. In the regulator’s own words, such a discount is in effect a subsidy paid by the other network users.

What is allowed is a discount that reflects real savings. Large users who shift consumption away from peak hours already get one, worth up to 65% off the network tariff, because moving off the peak genuinely delays the need to build more cable. The regulator says it will soon publish a study on whether electricity producers should also contribute to network costs, for example through a feed-in tariff.

What happens next

For 2026 the increase is modest and already fixed: the regulator has set tariffs that add about 25 euros a year to an average household, an average rise of just over 3%.

The longer curve is the one worth watching, and so is the argument about who sits on which part of it. The cabinet is preparing its own letter to parliament on how energy bills develop over the coming years. When it is published, the question it has to answer is the one the regulator has just framed: if the network bill is going to double, and it is billed per connection rather than per unit of power, who ends up carrying it.