Dutch homes are about to need storage. On 1 January 2027 the salderingsregeling ends, and electricity fed back to the grid will be paid for separately. Suppliers must pay at least 50% of the bare supply price until 2030. Solar owners are responding: nearly 80,000 plug-in home batteries are now in use in the Netherlands, up from about 22,500 at the end of 2025.
Storage helps the grid too
A home battery stores midday solar for the evening. It can also ease a congested grid. In a pilot in Ansen, Drenthe, nine home batteries cut peaks on the medium-voltage grid by 3.5 to 6 percent. Local use of solar power rose by 20 to 30 percent. The grid operator needed the batteries for local peak shaving only about 1% of the time.
Why sodium-ion suits the home
Sodium-ion’s main drawback is a lower energy density than lithium chemistries, so a battery of the same capacity is bulkier. That hardly matters for a unit that sits in a garage or utility room and never has to move. What you gain in return:
Safety: Developers report strong thermal-runaway resistance, including HiNa’s non-flammable electrolyte tests on small cells.
Long life: CATL’s storage cell is reported at more than 15,000 cycles. That is decades of daily cycling.
Cold tolerance: The same report gives an operating range down to −40 °C, which helps in an unheated shed or garage.
Abundant material: Sodium is one of the most common elements on earth, so the chemistry doesn’t rely on lithium supply chains.
A maturing technology
Sodium-ion is moving from lab to market. BYD delivered a megawatt-scale sodium storage system in 2025. CATL said in June it would start customer deliveries of sodium-ion storage systems in September 2026.
Sodium-ion is not yet cheaper than the incumbent. Sodium-ion cells currently cost RMB 0.4–0.5 per Wh, against RMB 0.3–0.4 for lithium iron phosphate (LFP). Industry targets put cell cost at parity with LFP by the end of 2026 and system cost at parity by 2027, but those are targets, not facts. Most experts see sodium as a complement to lithium rather than a replacement.
The bigger picture
The energy transition needs a lot of flexible storage, in homes as well as on the grid. A second battery chemistry makes that build-out less dependent on any one material. For households, it makes batteries cheaper and safer. Sodium-ion is a strong fit for the stationary, long-life job a home battery does.