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 for example 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.
11075400
00040812162024
øre / kWh
Off-peak, 00–06 12 øre
Standard, 06–17 & 21–24 37 øre
Peak, 17–21 110 øre
Radius area, Denmark, winter rates, incl. VAT. Levels differ by operator.
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, the fees are growing. 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. 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.
Residential grid fees, network charge only
Europe is already a patchwork
What each market's grid fee responds to, and how far apart its cheapest and most expensive hours sit.
-
Spain
time
20×
Mandatory for every home under 15 kW
-
Denmark
time
9.2×
Three bands, twice as steep in winter
-
Germany
time
5–20×
Low tariff 10–40% of standard, high tariff up to double it
-
Estonia
timeopt-in
2.7×
Only on the four-rate package
-
Finland
timeopt-in
2.1×
Flat by default, one free switch a year
-
Netherlands
flat2029
2–3×
Flat today, proposal awaiting the regulator
-
Belgium Flanders
peak power
n/a
No time signal. Billed on your monthly peak
-
Norway
timepeak power
both
Capacity tiers plus a day and night rate
Responds to when you charge
Responds to how hard you charge
Responds to neither
Dashed = regulated ceiling or proposal, not a rate in force
Network charge only, incl. VAT. Rates vary by operator. The Dutch figure is a proposal and the German one a regulated ceiling, not rates in force.
It is easier to see with one charging session.
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. This is only what the network operator charges to deliver it.
Off-peak
01:00
6 kr
≈ €0.80
12 øre/kWh
Standard
14:00
18.50 kr
≈ €2.48
37 øre/kWh
Peak
18:00
55 kr
≈ €7.37
110 øre/kWh
49 kr
Difference 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.
Denmark, winter rates, incl. VAT, spot price excluded. 50 kWh is about 280 km.
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.
500k
extra 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.
€56.6
per kW of your monthly peak, every year. Everyone pays for at least 2.5 kW.
-
3.7 kW at 02:00
Household near idle. The car never sets the peak.
4.3 kW€243/yr
-
3.7 kW at 18:30
Stacked on cooking and heating.
7.4 kW€419/yr
-
11 kW at 18:30
The car sets the peak on its own.
13.0 kW€736/yr
Flanders 2026 reference rate, incl. VAT, billed on your twelve monthly peaks. Scenarios are illustrative, not measured.
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.
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 lets you add time-based grid and distribution fees to your tariff, so charging is scheduled against the cost that actually lands on your bill, not the spot price alone. Across 29 European markets, automatically, with no extra hardware.
Download Gridio
For energy companies, utilities and DSOs
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.
Gridio for business
