Open charging market or closed portal: the choice is being made now

The Fuel Transition Obligation has, since 1 January 2026, made every kWh you charge at home potentially worth money. In one stroke a new market has appeared: that of the registration providers who register your charging sessions with the NEa and pay the revenue out to you.

New markets are shaped in their first year not by law alone, but by the technical choices that parties make among themselves. Who may access your charging data? By which route? And can you take that data with you if you switch providers? These questions sound technical. They determine whether there will be an open market, or a collection of closed portals.

This is how we see it.

Two roles that should not be in one hand

Some of the parties in this market wear two hats. They are a CPO • they supply your charger and run the portal where your charging data arrives • and they are themselves a registration provider, in direct competition with independent parties.

That combination is economically logical and not in itself prohibited. But it creates an interest that runs counter to the customer's: the party that controls access to your charging data competes with everyone who needs that same data to serve you. Whoever guards the gate and stands selling in the hall at the same time holds a lever that, in a healthy market, should rest with no one.

Data portability is not a feature. It is the market.

Whether you can take your charging data to a registration provider of your choice is not an extra. It is the precondition for there being anything to choose at all.

Without a standardised, customer-authorised route to retrieve charging sessions, your freedom of choice collapses into the party that happens to run your portal. You can then choose in form, but not switch in practice. That is exactly the kind of false choice other markets have solved in the past • telecoms with number portability, banks with the switching service, energy with a standardised switching process. Interoperability was a choice in every one of those cases, and almost never one the incumbent made of its own accord.

The revenue belongs to the resident

Under the Energy for Transport Regulation 2026, the Emission Reduction Unit (ERE) accrues to the holder of the energy contract on the connection • the EAN. For home charging, that is the resident, not the supplier of the charger and not the operator of the portal.

If the revenue belongs to the resident, then the choice of who registers that revenue on the resident's behalf belongs there too. The mandate lies with the customer. Any route that takes that mandate back in practice • by shielding data, or by casting an alternative route as suspect • runs counter to that logic.

Our position • an open standard

We believe this market works best when charging data is available through an open, customer-authorised route. In order of preference:

• An OAuth2 connection, where you log in once and grant a scoped authorisation. The registration provider gets read-only access to your charging sessions, nothing more. This is the industry standard • we already run this flow with the likes of Easee, Tesla, Enphase, Plugchoice and Peblar.
• A data-export API that delivers, per customer and after authorisation, a structured export of charging sessions. This is precisely what the right to data portability intends.
• A validated CSV export that you download and upload yourself. The most basic option, and as far as we are concerned the floor that every party should offer.

In all three cases the mandate lies with the customer. That is not an accidental outcome • it is the whole point.

Not an attack. But a line.

This is not an attack on a company. Vertical integration is allowed, and convenience has value for those who choose it deliberately. But there is a line, and it is crossed the moment a party uses its position as gatekeeper to disadvantage competition in the adjacent market.

Then it is no longer about convenience. Then data that legally belongs to the customer is shielded, the only route to that data runs through the gatekeeper itself, and an independent route is sometimes even framed as suspect in customer communication. That is not customer protection. That is market foreclosure • and it is a choice, not a technical necessity.

We name that choice. Not to damage a competitor, but because a market that is being shaped right now should come into being in the open air, and not behind the walls of a single portal.

Why it is us saying this

Joulo is deliberately not a CPO. We do not sell your charger and we do not run your portal. We are only the layer that registers your sessions and pays you out every quarter • 20% as standard, down to 10% through referrals, cancellable annually.

That makes us dependent on open access to data that belongs to the customer. You could call that self-interest, and in part it is. But it also makes us an honest test case: if an independent registration provider with explicit customer authorisation cannot reach data that legally belongs to that customer, then the market is not open. How open this market becomes, you will not read off the prettiest brochure, but off the dullest technical choice • whether your data has an exit.

What this means for you

Concretely, when you choose a charger or a registration provider now: ask whether you can export your own charging sessions, or have them retrieved by a party of your choice on your authorisation. If you do not get a clear yes, you are in practice tied to the portal that happens to run your charger • however good that portal otherwise is.

The mandate belongs to you. A market that respects that lets your data out the door.

Sources

1. Netherlands Emissions Authority • Registering electricity for transport
2. NEa • List of registration providers (2 February 2026)