Here is a question more people should ask about the charger bolted to their wall: who actually controls it?
You paid for it. It is your electricity, your meter, your wall. And yet, for a huge number of NewMotion chargers in the Netherlands and Belgium, the answer has quietly become "not you." Not because the hardware failed. Because the company behind it kept changing, and the account that steers the charger went along for the ride.
That is worth fixing, and it is fixable.
You bought the charger. You did not rent the lock-in.
A modern home charger is two things stacked on top of each other. There is the hardware: the box, the socket, the relay, the meter. And there is the backend: the cloud platform that authorizes sessions, logs your kWh, handles reimbursement and lets you start and stop remotely.
You own the first part outright. The second part is where control lives. And on a NewMotion charger, that second part has been handed from company to company without anyone asking the owner what they wanted.
What actually happened to NewMotion
Follow the chain, because it explains why so many of these chargers feel orphaned.
- 2017: Shell buys NewMotion.
- 2021: NewMotion is rebranded to Shell Recharge Solutions. The NewMotion name disappears.
- 2024: Shell signs an agreement to transfer its entire home and workplace charging business to 50five across the Netherlands, Belgium and four other markets.
- 2026: the maker itself, the Belgian manufacturer eNovates, goes bankrupt after its parent withdrew support, with more than 300,000 chargers reported across Europe, before restarting weeks later under new ownership.
Two brand handovers and a bankruptcy, all on a charger you never stopped owning. Somewhere in that shuffle, plenty of units were never cleanly re-registered in the new backend. The owner ends up locked out of their own hardware, on a platform they never chose, chasing a helpdesk that keeps changing hands.
The hardware is fine. The account around it moved.
This is the part people get backwards. When a provider changes direction, the panic is about the metal on the wall. Will it still charge? Almost always, yes. A charger does not forget how electricity works because a logo changed.
What breaks is everything around it. Reimbursement that does not carry over automatically. A pass that suddenly needs a new account. Remote start and stop that goes quiet. Live kWh that stops flowing into the backend, which matters more than ever now that the Dutch ERE regeling pays owners for every metered kilowatt-hour their charger reports. A dead or inaccessible backend is not a small annoyance. It is money left on the table and control you no longer have.
We have said this before, when a charging backend changed direction and chargers risked getting trapped. The hardware is rarely the first thing to fail. The platform is.
OCPP is the way back
Here is the good news, and it is baked into the charger you already own. NewMotion chargers speak OCPP, the open protocol that connects a charging station to a backoffice. OCPP was designed so a charger is not married to one vendor for life. That design decision is exactly what lets you reclaim it.
A charger points at one backend at a time, defined by a single setting: the backend URL. Change that setting, and the charger reports to a platform you control instead of one you inherited. On a NewMotion Home Advanced, that platform can be Plugchoice, and once it is connected, your live meter values flow again and the charger is yours to manage.
OCPP does not fix everything. It does not manufacture spare parts or revive a warranty. What it does is hand back operational control, which is the part that actually went missing.
What to do now
If you have a NewMotion or Shell Recharge home charger, you do not have to wait for the next handover to decide your charger's future for you.
We wrote a step-by-step guide for exactly this hardware: how to connect a NewMotion Home Advanced 2.1 or 2.2 to Plugchoice. It walks through finding the charger on your network and pointing it at a backend you control. If you get stuck, or you are not sure whether your unit was ever registered with an operator, contact us and we will help you work it out.
It is your charger. It should answer to you.
Sources
- Shell rebrands NewMotion to Shell Recharge Solutions: shell.com
- Shell transfers home and workplace charging to 50five: electrive.com
- eNovates bankruptcy: newmobility.news
- eNovates restart under Koolen Industries: hightechsystems.nl
- ERE regeling for home chargers: isde.nl