Energy Sharing: Already Possible Today
Do you have solar panels and feed surplus you don't use yourself back into the grid? Since 2022, you've been allowed to share that surplus — with yourself (for example between your house and a garage or second home on a different connection point), with co-owners in an apartment building, or sell it to a chosen neighbour or family member. The rule is strict: the shared surplus must be used within the same quarter-hour by whoever receives it — anything not consumed at that moment simply counts as ordinary grid feed-in, not as "shared".
In practice, this requires an administrative arrangement with your supplier and Fluvius, not a technical change to your installation. That's also why adoption remains low: according to the VREG dashboard "Energie delen en verkopen" , only a few thousand people in Flanders currently share energy, against more than a million solar-equipped households.
Neighborhood Batteries: Still Pilot Projects
A neighborhood battery is a shared battery that stores energy for multiple households or an entire neighborhood, rather than for a single home. Unlike energy sharing, this isn't yet a program a household in Flanders can sign up for: it's confined to local pilot projects, such as the COPPER project in Ghent (with Fluvius, Ghent University and a few mobility companies), which tests shared electric vehicles as distributed storage, running until mid-2027.
Important not to confuse this with: an individual home battery at your own house is a completely different, fully available topic — with an existing Flemish premium and a fast-growing number of installations. A neighborhood battery is shared infrastructure for an entire area, not a product an individual can buy or connect today.
What Does This Mean for You, Today?
If you have solar panels with a regular surplus: energy sharing is worth looking into, even though it takes some sorting out with your supplier. Neighborhood batteries are, for now, something to watch rather than act on — unless you happen to live in a municipality with an active pilot project.