The concession for public charging in Rotterdam and 42 other municipalities across the provinces of Zuid-Holland and Zeeland has been awarded to TotalEnergies Public Charging, together with Velian. It covers taking over and modernising roughly 1,860 existing charge points and rolling out thousands of new ones over the coming years. The part worth reading twice is the pricing: tariffs move with developments in the energy market and with changes in taxes and grid costs, and the poles carry a screen showing the current rate before a session starts, with the running cost visible during it and contactless payment on the pole.
Dynamic pricing at a public charge point is a bigger change than it sounds, because it turns the kerb into something a driver can time. Until now the price signal that varies by the hour lived almost entirely at home: a dynamic electricity contract, a charger that knows the hourly rate, and a car that waits for the cheap window. Public charging was a flat number you found out afterwards on a receipt. Putting the current rate on a screen in front of the driver, and letting it follow the market, is the same mechanism arriving in the one place where most people who cannot charge at home actually charge.
For the grid the logic is the same as it is at home, only louder. Prices that reflect what the system costs at that moment are the cheapest way to move demand off the peak, which matters in a province where thousands of new poles are going in at once. The authorities involved say the tariffs are expected to be among the lowest for public charging in the Netherlands, which is their claim rather than a measurement, and it is the kind of claim worth revisiting in a year.
There is a practical footnote for anyone running chargers on a site rather than at the kerb. A tariff that moves is only useful if something can act on it, and that is a backend question, not a hardware one. Plugchoice smart charging reads the price signal and the meter and schedules sessions against both, on any charger that speaks OCPP. The interesting thing about a concession this size is not that one operator will do it well, it is that a variable price at a public pole makes the idea ordinary, and ordinary is what makes people ask for it on their own sites.
Sources: Mobiliteit.nl, September 9, 2026; Duurzaam Ondernemen; Kijk op Zuid-Holland.