ERE certificates in the Netherlands, voluntary carbon markets in Belgium, and CSRD-grade emissions data have quietly turned every verified charging session into a regulated financial asset. The reason almost no one is collecting it is structural – the difference between a CPMS used as a tool and a CPMS that operates as infrastructure.
Across the Netherlands and Belgium, governments have built mandatory market mechanisms designed to push the cost of decarbonisation onto fossil fuel suppliers. Refiners, importers and fuel distributors are legally required to surrender trade-able certificates each year, proof that a quantity of fossil fuel consumption has been displaced by renewable energy.
EV charging is one of the most efficient sources of those certificates.
Every metered kWh delivered through a charge point is, in principle, eligible to generate a credit with a market price attached. The credit is not a marketing claim or a sustainability gesture. It is a regulated instrument with obligated buyers, registry oversight, and a clearing price.
The condition is precise: the underlying session data must be verified, metered, time-stamped and auditable, in a format the registry will accept. The only system that holds that data is the operator’s charge point management platform. And almost every CPMS in the European market today is sitting on top of that data without converting it into the asset class it has become.
The Netherlands: a market that has just been reset
On 1 January 2026 the Dutch renewable transport fuel market was restructured. The previous unit – the HBE (Hernieuwbare Brandstofeenheden), denominated in gigajoules of renewable energy delivered – was replaced by the ERE (Emissiereductie Eenheid, Emission Reduction Unit), denominated in kilograms of CO₂ avoided. The market architecture is unchanged: Dutch law obliges fossil fuel suppliers to surrender certificates each compliance year, and suppliers who fall short must purchase the difference from those who can generate them. EV charging operators are explicitly eligible.
The shift from energy to emissions is not cosmetic. It rebases how each kWh is valued, expands the system from four certificate categories to sixteen – segmented by transport mode and feedstock – and reissues every supplier obligation against the new unit. The structural implication for charging operators is that the operators who establish their position in the first ERE compliance year will define the baseline for every compliance year that follows.
The unit economics under the new system:
- 1 ERE represents 1 kg of avoided CO₂ relative to a fossil-fuel baseline
- ERE certificates currently clear at approximately €0.10 – €0.18 per kWh of eligible charging delivered, depending on market conditions
- A network delivering 500,000 kWh per year therefore generates €50,000 – €90,000 per year in eligible ERE revenue, recurring, for the operating life of the infrastructure
- Eligibility requires a MID-certified energy meter at the charge point, and registration through an NEa-authorised service provider
The figures require no additional capital expenditure on charging infrastructure and no operational change. They depend solely on whether the existing session data, captured from MID-grade hardware, is in a form the NEa ERE registry will accept.
Consider a representative case from North Holland. A logistics operator runs 80 charge points across two depot sites, serving a mixed fleet of vans and trucks on overnight rotations.
- Annual energy delivered: 730,000 kWh
- Eligible ERE revenue at current clearing prices: approximately €73,000 – €131,000 per year
- ERE revenue currently collected: zero
The reason is not technical. The operator’s CPMS exports OCPP logs. It does not surface ERE-grade metered data, does not maintain registry relationships, and does not assume responsibility for compliance reporting. The credits are generated each time a vehicle is plugged in – and discarded each time the data leaves the platform.
Belgium: voluntary carbon markets and the CSRD shift
Belgium has not implemented a direct ERE equivalent. Two mechanisms nonetheless make verified charging data a commercial asset for operators positioned to capture it.
The voluntary carbon market is the more immediate channel. Every 1,000 kWh of EV charging displaces approximately 0.2 tCO₂e relative to a fossil-fuel baseline. A 500,000 kWh network therefore displaces around 100 tCO₂e per year. At voluntary carbon prices of €15 – 80 per tonne, that translates into €1,500 – €8,000 per year in stackable revenue, contingent again on verified session data.
The second mechanism is regulatory rather than commercial in the short term, but more consequential in the medium term. Under the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, large Belgian companies are required from the 2025 – 2026 reporting cycle onwards to report verified emissions data, including upstream and downstream activity. Charging operators who can certify the tCO₂e displaced by their network hold a compliance asset – initially for their own reporting, and increasingly as a service to the corporate fleets and tenants whose vehicles they charge.
The direction of the regulation is unambiguous. Verified session data is moving from a technical artefact to a financial and compliance instrument.
The pattern beneath the opportunity: tool versus infrastructure
ERE is the most developed example of a broader pattern. Verified, session-level charging data is becoming a primitive that regulated markets can settle against. ERE is the first wave; voluntary carbon and CSRD reporting are the second; grid-balancing and flexibility markets, where charge points are increasingly priced as dispatch-able load, will be the third.
Each of these markets requires the same three conditions: data captured to specification at the connector level, retained in an auditable form, and addressable through an interface that registries, settlement counterparties and corporate reporting systems can consume.
A CPMS that meets these conditions functions as infrastructure – a system of record on which financial and regulatory processes run. A CPMS that does not meet them functions as a tool – a control surface that produces operational logs.
The distinction has been largely cosmetic for most of the industry’s history. As regulated value layers stack on top of charging volume, the distinction becomes the difference between operators who capture that value and operators who do not.
Why this opportunity has remained largely invisible
Three structural reasons explain why most operators have not engaged with these markets.
The first is product scope. CPMS vendors have historically optimised for uptime, hardware compatibility and user experience. Revenue from regulatory energy markets sits outside that scope. It requires fluency in energy law, registry integrations and ongoing compliance accountability – none of which features in a typical CPMS roadmap.
The second is the perceived complexity of the data. Claiming ERE credits requires MID-grade metered, auditable session data in defined formats, submitted to the NEa registry on fixed timelines. To operators using legacy or fragmented platforms, the work has looked like a consultancy project rather than a platform feature. It is the latter, but only when the underlying data is captured to specification from the outset.
The third is a misreading of the price signal. ERE pricing – like the HBE pricing it replaces – will be subject to volatility, and during low-price periods the opportunity can appear marginal. The structural picture is different. As electrification scales and the volumes obligated to fossil fuel suppliers increase, demand for ERE certificates is mandated by law, not demand-led. The market is structurally supported, and the operators who establish their data infrastructure and registry relationships in the first ERE compliance year will hold a compounding advantage in every subsequent year.
The questions to put to any CPMS
For operators evaluating platforms – or revisiting whether the current platform remains fit for purpose – four questions clarify the position quickly:
- Does the CPMS capture verified, MID-grade metered kWh data per session and per connector, in a format acceptable to the NEa ERE registry?
- Does it have an existing integration with the NEa ERE registry, or a committed roadmap to one?
- Can it produce kWh-by-period reports at connector and operator level with accurate timestamps?
- Can it separate energy by source where relevant – grid versus on-site solar or storage – and expose that distinction through an API?
For any operator running more than approximately 20 chargers in the Netherlands, the unclaimed revenue figure is almost certainly material.
A useful test sits behind these questions. An infrastructure-grade CPMS is one that operators want to write information to as much as they pull information from. If the system is treated as a one-way export of operational data rather than a system of record for the energy, financial and compliance flows of the network, it will not support the value layers now forming on top of charging.
The data foundation, and what it makes possible
Verified, session-level charging data is the precondition for every regulated revenue layer described above – ERE today, voluntary carbon and CSRD next, grid-balancing and flexibility markets in the medium term. Without it, no part of that stack is reachable. With it, the work to participate in those markets becomes a tractable extension of what the CPMS already produces, rather than a parallel consultancy project.
Monta captures over 3.3 million charging sessions per month across more than 280,000 connected charge points, delivering 81 GWh of energy. Session-level data, operator-level attribution and connector-level metering are standard rather than configurable, and exposed through API, event streams and SQL access alongside the operator-facing interface.
That foundation is what makes the conversation about regulated revenue a serious one. It is the half of the chain that determines whether an operator’s network is even eligible to participate. Most networks today are not.
The bottom line
The charging infrastructure already in the ground is generating regulated value that most operators are not capturing. For a mid-sized Dutch fleet operator, that value is on the order of €50,000 – €100,000 per year, recurring, for the operating life of the network. Across the Netherlands and Belgium, the aggregate unclaimed value across deployed networks runs into tens of millions of euros annually.
The session data, regulatory mechanism and market mechanisms all exist. What has not yet existed at scale is the CPMS-side infrastructure that turns charging volume into eligible, registry-grade data on demand – at the cost-base of a system feature.
The first ERE compliance year is open now. The remaining question is not whether this revenue is real. It is whether the system on which the network runs is built to make it reachable – and how much of the compounding first-mover advantage will go to the operators who treat their CPMS as infrastructure in this compliance year rather than the next.