Spot prices are only half your bill: what time-of-use grid fees mean for EV charging
Eliis Oru
August 19, 2026
Ask a Gridio user what electricity costs right now and many of them can tell you, to the cent. Spot prices have become something people actually watch. Ask the same person what their grid fee is and you will usually get a blank look.
That is a problem, because in Denmark, plugging in at 18:00 instead of 01:00 costs more than nine times as much per kilowatt-hour before the spot price is counted at all.
Network tariff only, excludes the spot price
The second clock on your bill
What it costs to move one kWh through the local grid, hour by hour. Radius network area, Denmark, winter rates, incl. VAT.
Radius Elnet, Nettarif C, winter rates in force early 2026, incl. 25% VAT. Winter runs October to March. Danish network operators set their own rates, so levels differ by address.
The half of the bill nobody talks about
Your electricity bill is not one price. It is at least three things stacked together: the energy itself, taxes and levies, and the cost of moving that energy through the cables to your house. That last part is the network charge, or grid fee.
Two things make it different from the spot price. First, you cannot shop around for it. Your network operator is decided by your address, not your contract, so switching supplier changes nothing about it. Second, it is growing. Dutch network operators expect household network costs to rise from around €477 in 2026 to roughly €772 by 2030. Across the EU, about 40% of distribution grids are more than 40 years old and the estimated investment need runs to €584 billion.
Someone has to pay for that, and the people paying are households. The interesting question is no longer whether grid fees go up. It is whether they go up for everyone equally, or more for the people who use the grid at its worst moments.
Europe has clearly decided on the second option.
This is not a future policy debate
In several of Gridio's markets the grid fee already changes by the hour, and has done for years. Most drivers have no idea.
Peak vs. cheapest hours, network tariff only
Same car, four countries, four different penalties
How many times more expensive the grid fee is at its daily peak than at its cheapest, on each market's time-differentiated residential tariff.
NetherlandsProposed system, from 2029 · expected spread
2–3×
Finland opt-inCaruna Seasonal Distribution, Nov–Mar · 3.23 → 6.73 c/kWh
2.1×
Finland defaultCaruna General Distribution · 5.26 c/kWh, flat
1×
Finland shows what happens when the signal is optional. The standard General Distribution tariff charges the same rate around the clock, so shifting a charging session saves nothing on the grid fee. A household has to actively switch products to get a time signal at all, and only one switch per year is free. That is exactly the gap EU policy is now trying to close.
Sources: Radius Elnet Nettarif C, Danish winter rates 2026; Elektrilevi network service price list valid from 1 June 2026; Caruna Oy network service price list, residential products; Netbeheer Nederland code amendment proposal submitted to ACM, 4 May 2026. All rates incl. VAT. Levels vary by network operator within each country.
Denmark is the extreme. Estonia hides the same idea inside package selection, so most households sit on a flat tariff with nothing to optimise. Finland makes the time signal opt-in entirely.
One 50 kWh charge · grid fee only
Plug in at 18:00 and you pay nine times more to move the same electricity
The electricity is identical. The spot price is not included here at all. This is purely what the local network operator charges to deliver it.
Off-peak01:006 kr≈ €0.8012 øre/kWh
Standard14:0018.50 kr≈ €2.4837 øre/kWh
Peak18:0055 kr≈ €7.37110 øre/kWh
49 krDifference between the cheapest and the most expensive version of the same charge, before a single cent of spot price, tax or VAT on the energy itself.
Radius Elnet Nettarif C, Danish winter rates in force early 2026, incl. 25% VAT. 50 kWh is roughly a full charge on a mid-sized EV, or about 280 km. Converted at 7.46 DKK/EUR. Peak window is 17:00–21:00, off-peak 00:00–06:00.
Do that a hundred times a year and it is real money, without driving less or buying anything.
The Netherlands shows where this is going
Dutch households currently pay a flat network charge based on the size of their connection. It makes no difference when you use electricity, or even how much. In May the grid operators asked the regulator to change that completely.
Netherlands · proposed from 1 January 2029
The expensive window moves with the season
Dutch grid operators have asked the regulator to make two thirds of the residential network charge depend on when and how much you use. Four price levels, five blocks a day, different in summer and winter.
Summer1 Apr – 30 Sep
cheaper blocks
19:00 – 24:00
Winter1 Oct – 31 Mar
cheaper blocks
16:00 – 23:00
0006121824
67%of the transport tariff becomes dependent on volume and timing. The remaining third stays tied to your connection capacity.
11%less pressure on the busiest moments, if consumption spreads out as intended.
500kextra charge points connectable by 2030 without immediate grid reinforcement, or 700,000 extra homes.
An EV that starts charging at 18:00 lands squarely in the most expensive winter block. Moving the same session past 23:00, or into the middle of the day, moves it out of the peak entirely. Nothing about the car changes. Only the timing.
Netbeheer Nederland code amendment proposal submitted to ACM, 4 May 2026, covering all connections up to 3×80 A. Not yet approved: ACM published a draft decision for consultation and aims to decide by the end of 2026, with introduction expected in 2029. Exact boundaries of the intermediate blocks may change during consultation.
It is not law yet, and the timeline runs to 2029. But the direction is set, and operators expect around two thirds of households, mostly lower-consumption ones, to end up paying relatively less. The people paying more will be the ones charging at 18:00 in January.
Then Belgium reverses the advice
Everything above assumes the grid fee has a clock in it. Belgium is a reminder that it does not always, and that the two designs can tell you opposite things.
Flanders, Belgium · capacity tariff
Here the grid does not ask when you charged. It asks how hard.
Flanders scrapped the day and night distinction on network costs entirely. Instead, part of the network charge is billed on your peak demand: the highest quarter-hour of power you pull from the grid each month, averaged across the year. Charging faster costs more, even at 3am.
€56.6per kW of annual peak, incl. VAT. Everyone pays for at least 2.5 kW, even if their real peak is lower.
What different charging setups do to that peak
Slow, overnight, spread3.7 kW single phase at 02:00, household near idle. The car never becomes the monthly peak.
4.3 kW€243/yr
Slow, but during dinner3.7 kW at 18:30, stacked on top of cooking, lighting and a heat pump.
7.4 kW€419/yr
Full speed, during dinner11 kW three phase at 18:30, same household load underneath it.
13.0 kW€736/yr
This is the part that breaks a simple charging timer. Under a time-of-use tariff the answer is "charge in the cheapest hour, as fast as you can". Under a capacity tariff the answer can be the opposite: throttle the session, stretch it across the night, and never let the car set the monthly peak. Belgium runs both logics at once, in different regions, so the same app has to solve two different problems depending on the postcode.
FlandersPeak demand, since 2023. Timing irrelevant, power matters.
WalloniaTime-of-use, since 1 Jan 2026. Peak 07–11 and 17–22, every day including weekends.
BrusselsConnection capacity, since 2020. Fixed, so neither timing nor power changes it.
VREG reference capacity tariff for 2026: €53.39 per kW/year excl. VAT, around €56.6 incl. VAT. The exact rate differs by Fluvius network area. Billed on the average of twelve monthly quarter-hour consumption peaks; export from solar panels does not count towards the peak. Peak figures above are illustrative household scenarios, not measured averages. Wallonia: CWaPE tariff reform effective 1 January 2026, replacing the previous day, night and weekend structure.
In Denmark you want to push as much energy as possible into the cheap overnight window. In Flanders that same behaviour sets a peak you then pay for all year. Three regions, one country, three different right answers.
Why the EU is pushing this
None of it is coincidence. The Commission's Electrification Action Plan, published in July, came with a proposal to amend electricity market rules aimed squarely at network charges: time-of-use and locational signals, more transparency on how tariffs are calculated, and a push for regulators to favour flexibility, batteries and vehicle-to-grid over simply laying more cable. The broader Grids Package is a priority file for 2026, and the Network Code on Demand Response is due to harmonise flexibility rules by 2027.
Read together, it is a continent deciding that the cheapest way to avoid grid reinforcement is to charge people for congestion.
What this means for smart charging
There is an obvious objection to what Gridio does: what happens in a calm year, when spot spreads narrow and there is less to optimise?
The answer is above. Grid fee spreads are not narrowing. They are being widened deliberately, by regulation, on a timeline running well past 2029. Two independent price signals now sit on the same charging session, calculated by different parties on different logic, and they do not always agree. Denmark's cheapest network hour and its cheapest spot hour are close but not identical. Flanders wants you to charge slowly while the spot market wants you to charge fast.
A wall timer set to 23:00 solves the 2019 version of this problem.
If you are an energy retailer or utility, the same shift arrives from the other side. Your customers are about to get a second price signal they did not ask for, cannot switch away from, and mostly cannot see. Whoever hands them a tool that quietly handles both signals gets credit for the saving.
Two things worth doing now
Check which network package you are on. In Estonia and Finland the default is usually the flat one, and the time-differentiated option has to be requested.
Stop doing this by hand. Two signals, changing hourly, differing by country and region, shifting with the season. This is what software is for.
For EV drivers
Let Gridio watch both clocks
Gridio already shifts your charging into the cheapest hours across 11 European markets, automatically, with no extra hardware. As grid fees start moving by the hour too, getting that timing right stops being something you can do in your head.
Your customers are about to get a second price signal
Time-of-use network tariffs and capacity charges are arriving market by market, and most households will not see them coming. If you are working out how smart EV charging fits into demand response, peak shaving or network tariff response, we would like to talk.
