Essent: Making smart charging work for everyone
The Netherlands is one of Europe’s fastest-growing EV markets. Over 35% of new vehicles are now electric, and most charging happens at home. This convenience is also a challenge: unmanaged home charging can increase peak electricity demand, driving higher costs across the grid.
For Essent, this is more than a technical grid issue, it’s a once-in-a-decade customer opportunity. Whoever makes smart charging effortless for mainstream consumers will shape the next decade of residential energy.
As one of the Netherlands’ largest energy suppliers, serving over 2.5 million households, Essent already plays a central role in this transition. Beyond supplying electricity, Essent has a long track record of delivering home-energy services, from solar and heating installations to EV charger sales, giving it a strong foundation to bring smart charging to the mass market.
Putting the customer at the center
Essent designed its smart-charging product around a single question: what would it take for every household, not just early adopters, to benefit from EV smart charging?
Five design principles guided the product from day one:
- For everyone. Smart charging should serve ordinary households, not just tech-savvy or premium-hardware owners.
- Real savings. Tangible financial benefits must flow directly to the customer’s wallet.
- Effortless setup. Linking a car or charger to the Essent app should be so simple that anyone can do it, with no technical knowledge required.
- Customers are in control. Smart charging only activates when users opt in, and always respects their preferences (battery level, departure time, and charging priorities).
- Seamless. Vehicle owners should receive ongoing value automatically, without needing to constantly adjust settings or monitor prices.
Partnering with Enode gave Essent seamless access to over 60 EV and charger brands, allowing its teams to focus on proposition design and the customer experience instead of managing API integrations.
Essent Slim Laden (Dutch for smart charging) puts these principles into practice, offering an intuitive service that automatically schedules EV charging when electricity is cheapest or greenest.
Essent also recognized that not all consumers want the same level of involvement or price exposure:
- For dynamic-hourly tariff customers, Slim Laden handles price optimization automatically.
- For fixed or variable-tariff customers, it ensures predictable household pricing while rewarding users who allow Essent to manage charging intelligently.
The result is a smart-charging experience that adapts to different customer preferences: simple, flexible, and inclusive.
“Our goal was to make flexibility accessible and valuable. Customers shouldn’t need to understand the grid to benefit from it.” says Daan Hermans, Head of eMobility at Essent.
Tangible results and future potential
Thousands of EV drivers already use Essent Slim Laden to lower their total cost of ownership, saving up to €300 per year.
But for Essent, smart charging is just the beginning. The company’s long-term vision is to build a holistic suite of smart-energy products that work together, not in isolation. Customers with eligible home-energy devices will automatically be able to connect them to smart energy products, charge EVs from surplus solar power, and manage household energy intelligently through one interface.
In this ecosystem, hardware manufacturers play a pivotal role. They need to ensure their products are future-proofed by making them easy for customers to connect and manage through the energy retailer’s app. Devices officially integrated through Enode will enable the seamless, consumer-centric experiences that define the next generation of smart energy.
This matters for hardware manufacturers
Consumers now expect smart-energy features to be available by default. When buying a car or charger, they increasingly assume it will integrate seamlessly with their energy supplier’s smart-charging or home-energy products.
Essent’s success proves this point: broad OEM coverage isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s fundamental to delivering the frictionless experiences customers expect.
“We see strong potential to bundle energy contracts with other e-mobility products. To do that successfully, every EV and charger brand needs to be able to connect in an easy and effortless manner” says Daan Hermans, Head of e-Mobility at Essent.
For hardware manufacturers, this represents both an opportunity and a shift in the market dynamic. Smart, connected energy products are now part of the purchase decision. Manufacturers that enter the Enode ecosystem gain:
- High scalability, with immediate compatibility to top-tier energy suppliers like Essent.
- More hardware sales by increasing market visibility and enhancing customer offering
- Greater consumer trust, by being part of reliable, well-designed and sought-after user experiences
In short: the best hardware brands will be judged by how well they integrate into the energy ecosystem.
