Research & implementation plan on price transparency. National Knowledge Platform on Charging Infrastructure

Over the last few years the market for electric vehicles and charging infrastructure has grown rapidly and this growth will undoubtedly continue in the years ahead. While the Dutch market for charging infrastructure and services is the best-developed in Europe, there remain issues with service provision and particularly price transparency.

This study had four objectives:

1. to establish an unambiguous definition of price transparency
2. to establish implementation rules and criteria and their technical, legal and contractual basis
3. to identify bottlenecks in the current system and design concrete solutions and actions for their implementation
4. to propose possible elements of an implementation plan, including a periodic, independent market review.

The picture to emerge from this study is that consumer prices are at present not sufficiently transparent and that there is not always strict compliance with existing legislation. Nonetheless, we can conclude that there are no technical obstacles and that good progress has already been made, providing scope for near-term improvement. Before it can be unequivocally stated that there is a need for (vigorous) intervention, it needs to be objectively established that there is some kind of market failure. As yet, however, there is no quantitative evidence of this.

Based on this study, several elements have been defined that contribute to price transparency:

1. take steps to ensure across-the-board adoption of the definition of transparency
2. lay out each market player’s responsibilities in a handbook
3. compliance with statutory obligations
4. enforcement of (legally) established agreements
5. creation of a ‘complaints desk’
6. creation of an annual benchmark