If you have solar, the first thing you learn about a dynamic tariff is that it has two prices in it, and they are not the same number. What you pay for a kilowatt-hour you import and what you are credited for one you export move independently — sometimes in opposite directions, and occasionally both below zero.
The hub prices them separately, because they are separate. This is how it does it, and what you will see on the days the two prices disagree with your intuition.
Export is priced separately, always
There is no mode in which your export is valued at your import price. Even where a supplier's feed gives one number, the sell side is read from its own field.
What sets that number is one of three things:
| Mode | The sell price is |
|---|---|
| From the provider (the default) | the export price published by the price source you chose for your zone (where that comes from), where it publishes one — otherwise your plan's zone sell rate |
| From the tariff plan | your plan's zone sell rate, whatever the market does |
| Market price × factor − fee | the market price for the period, multiplied by your export factor, minus your export fee |
The third is the one most dynamic export contracts actually describe: you are paid the market price, scaled a little and with a handling fee taken off.
Both fields are per kilowatt-hour, in the main unit of your currency — a fee of 2.5 cents is entered as 0.025, not 2.5. The factor runs 0 to 10, where 1 means the market price as it is. The fee runs −100 to 100, and its sign does real work: positive is subtracted (your supplier charges for taking the energy), negative is added (a contract that pays above the market). The order is factor, then fee, then — if you set one — the floor, which is applied last and in all three modes.
⚠️ One trap, and it catches exactly the reader this mode is written for. The formula works on the price of the source that covered the period. If your source is a spot source, that is the exchange price without fees or VAT — which is what an "exchange minus a fee" contract means. But if your source is all-in — a supplier's own retail feed, or a price you push and declare all-in — then the formula multiplies the retail price, VAT included, and your export value comes out far too high. An export contract written against the exchange needs either a spot source (a spot backup will do) or one of the other two sell modes. Which kind your source is is the thing to check first.
⚠️ Worth checking before you assume the default is doing what you want. Most public price sources publish an import price and no export price at all — which means the default mode falls through to your plan's zone sell rate, a number you may never have set deliberately. Open the price log and look at where the sell price for a period came from. If it says your plan, and you expected the market, that is the setting to change.
The hub applies no tax and no VAT to the sell side. Import gets your contract's fees, taxes and VAT; export does not. If your sell figure looks low next to your buy figure, that gap is most of the reason — and whether anything else is due on export income is a question for your own tax rules, not for the meter.
When the market goes negative
A day-ahead market can price a period below zero: there is more generation than demand, and the market pays to have the energy taken away. For an owner with panels, that is the uncomfortable case, because it inverts the usual arithmetic — during a negative period, exporting can cost you rather than credit you.
Whether that applies to you is a question about your contract, not about the hub — many contracts do not pass negative prices through at all. If yours does not, set a floor: a lowest sell price, below which the value is not allowed to go. Left alone it reads "none", and negative prices pass through; the floor is applied last, after the factor and the fee.
What the hub will not do is hide the case. Where the price really was negative and your contract really follows it, the hub keeps the negative number and books a negative value for that period, because that is what happened.
⚠️ Two different questions, and it is worth knowing which one you are asking. Does my contract pay negative prices? — read your terms, and set the floor to match them. Did my export actually land in negative periods? — read the price log, which keeps 40 days with one row per closed 15-minute period and the price that was applied to it.
There are no windows on the sell side — there is a flag
Cheap-window rules work on the buy price. There is no rule that opens a window when export is worth little.
What exists instead is a flag: sell is low below a level you set. It says something about the sell price right now, with no planning and no hysteresis. On a site with generation it is the flag that matters, because it is the signal that your own energy is worth more used than exported.
Where you read that flag depends on your route, the same way window state does — the two routes differ.
What to do with that signal stays with your automation. The hub has no relay and no setting that makes it turn anything on.
Your export value is never subtracted from your cost
This is a rule rather than a setting, and a dynamic price does not change it: imported energy with its cost, exported energy with its value, side by side. Nothing is netted.
The reason to keep it that way is that netting hides the thing you most want to see. Two households can show the same net figure while one of them imported twice as much at twice the price and exported twice as much for very little — and those are different situations, with different things to do about them.
Where netting does happen, it happens in your contract, not in the meter. Which brings us to the case this article was written for.
When netting ends
In some countries, exported kilowatt-hours have been allowed to cancel imported ones — one out, one in, and only the balance is billed. In the Netherlands that arrangement has a name readers there will know, salderingsregeling, and it ends on 1 January 2027, under a law passed in December 2024 (Wet beëindiging salderingsregeling).
When netting of that kind ends, two numbers that used to collapse into one stop doing so: what you paid to import, and what you were paid to export. They become separate amounts with separate prices, and the second is usually much smaller than the first.
That is exactly the shape the hub has always recorded in: the shape of the record does not change when the rules do. Your contract's sell-side numbers will change — the price, the fee — and those are yours to enter. What you will not have to do is separate figures that were never combined.
⚠️ Check your own contract's terms rather than working from a general date. Netting rules are national, the transition arrangements around them are specific, and what you are actually paid after one ends lives in your supplier's terms.
A charge some suppliers already make for accepting your export — Dutch readers will know it as terugleverkosten — is worth knowing where to put. If it is levied per kilowatt-hour, it belongs in the export fee field above. If it is a fixed monthly amount — which is how several suppliers band it by annual export — then the hub does not count it: the hub prices energy, per kilowatt-hour, and a fixed charge is not in its figures at all. Your month will differ from the statement by exactly that amount, and no setting changes it. Check your terms for which of the two yours is.
What the record shows afterwards
- Per period: the price log keeps 40 days as CSV, one row per closed 15-minute period, with the buy and sell prices that were applied and where each came from — your source, a backup, a price pushed from Home Assistant, the hour's mean, or your plan.
- Per point: export energy and its value are kept for every measurement point, so a site with more than one generation source can be read apart rather than as a lump.
- Per day and hour: the same split in the hub's own history, which is what the figures on the Economics page are built from.
What this doesn't do
- It does not pay you anything. The hub records what your contract's numbers say an exported kilowatt-hour was worth. Your supplier's statement is the authority on what you are actually paid.
- It does not net export against import, by design, as above.
- It does not switch anything. Not when the price goes negative, not when the sell flag turns on.
- It does not apply tax or VAT to export. If your statement shows something added on the export side, that is in your contract and not in the meter.
Local terms
Words a Dutch reader will meet on their own statement, and what each one is. How much any of them comes to, and how it is worked out, is between you and your supplier.
| Concept | Where | Term | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|
| Net metering | Netherlands | salderingsregeling | exported kilowatt-hours cancel imported ones on the bill, so only the balance is charged |
| Feed-in charge | Netherlands | terugleverkosten | a supplier's charge to households that feed solar power back; whether it is per kilowatt-hour or a fixed monthly amount is the supplier's choice, supervised for reasonableness by the regulator |
| Dynamic contract | Netherlands | dynamisch energiecontract | a contract with no end date whose per-kilowatt-hour price follows the wholesale market |
Where to read more
- What your solar export is worth — the same subject with a fixed export rate, step by step.
- Where your price comes from — the sell-side modes, the floors, and every field behind them.
- Economics — where cost and export value are shown side by side.
- Spot price, all-in price, your price — what the import side is made of, since the sell side is defined against it.