Building dynamic grid fees for grid- and market-friendly charging.
Today, household electricity consumers lack incentives to charge their cars when renewable energy is available and the grid has capacity to transport it. Drivers are generally left in the dark about fluctuating power prices or grid capacity constraints. Instead, curtailment and the costs of congestion management continue to rise.
To address this, we partnered with key innovators across the energy and mobility value chain to pioneer smart uni- and bidirectional charging. By leveraging charging flexibility, we aimed to lower costs for drivers and the entire power system by capturing low wholesale prices and reducing redispatch.
Limited grid capacity: Congestion management and grid expansion are becoming an increasing financial burden for the power system. In 2023 alone, redispatch costs amounted to around EUR 3.1 billion. At the same time, high power prices are slowing down the adoption of EVs. Above all, there is a lack of load- and price-dependent signals that would allow us to leverage the flexibility of electric vehicles.
Grid- and market-friendly incentives: We developed a novel dynamic grid fee that represents both the transmission and distribution grid at high spatial and temporal granularity. Aggregators and e-mobility service providers can use this integrated signal to optimize home and public charging, combining fluctuating power prices and grid load.
Individual and system-wide benefits: Leveraging low power prices and avoiding grid congestion creates savings. These should be shared along the value chain, making charging more affordable, strengthening flexibility service providers, and lowering system costs for everyone.
In phase 1, we built a simple model to indicate grid capacity. In phase 2, we moved on to fully dynamic grid fees with high temporal and spatial resolution: determined in advance from wholesale market information, weather forecasts, and load projections, and adjusted in 15-minute intervals.
In the pilot, we calculated grid fees for individual substations, allocated wallboxes to specific substations, and optimized charging according to day-ahead and intraday market signals as well as the dynamic grid fees, for around 500 electric vehicles.
At our closing event in January 2026, we discussed and demonstrated with experts from the energy industry, politics, and research how dynamic grid fees can relieve pressure on electricity grids and reduce costs for customers.
TenneT, TransnetBW, EWE NETZ, Bayernwerk Netz, LEW Verteilnetz, BMW Group, The Mobility House Energy, Octopus Energy, MAINGAU Energie, RWTH Aachen and E.ON Energy Research Center, Neon Neue Energieökonomik, and Fraunhofer FIT.
UnternehmerTUM’s Corporate Co-Innovation Platform fosters cross-sector collaboration through structured workshops and agile development cycles, enabling rapid prototyping and piloting. By combining diverse expertise and resources, the platform enables knowledge transfer, accelerates innovation, reduces time-to-market, and addresses complex challenges in the energy ecosystem, putting project partners at the center.
Bastian Lanzinger
Project Lead Co-Innovation Energy
