World premiere in The Netherlands

13.2.2016 Electric vehicles play an important role to ensure a stable electricity network.

TenneT and The New Motion have started to use thousands of electric cars (EV’s) to ensure the stability of the electricity grid. The EV’s are participating ‘live’ on the ’frequency imbalance market”. The introduction of EV’s on this market at this scale is a world premiere. With the increase of electricity from renewable sources such as wind and solar energy, the balance between electricity production and demand needs to be adjusted more often. This requires new solutions in order to absorb these fluctuations of the electricity network.

"This pilot is part of TenneT’s overall strategy to prepare energy systems for the larger use of renewable energy. In the coming years, the generation of volatile electricity, i.e. electricity that fluctuates in production output, will increase and conventional power plants will slowly be taken out of operation. Therefore, it will become necessary to absorb the sudden irregular rise and fall (fluctuations) of the electricity that is generated. Companies such as The New Motion are able to control the power usage from all connected EV’s to alleviate these fluctuations and by doing so they play an important role in TenneT’s vision,” says Ben Voorhorst, Chief Operations Officer at TenneT.

Always in balance

TenneT's role is to ensure a stable electricity grid, which means that the supply and demand of electricity should always be equal to each other. Imbalances between supply and demand results in irregularities in the grid frequency. Until now, the traditional large players in the electricity market solved these irregularities by measuring them and changing their production output or demand accordingly (on the frequency imbalance market). The market was inaccessible for small players with aggregated volumes. TenneT and The New Motion will use the next year to demonstrate the value of the contribution of an aggregate pool of EV’s. During this period, The New Motion will start offering all customers the opportunity to participate.

"The New Motion’s goal is to accelerate the transition towards sustainable mobility. With this new technology we can make electric driving even more attractive for our customers. With over 25.000 charge points we operate the largest charge network in Europe. It is important that we can offer this new service to our clients as soon as possible, so they can experience the full potential of electric mobility” says Ritsaart van Montfrans, Founder of The New Motion.


From the start, The New Motion has worked to unlock the potential of energy services for electric vehicles. An electric car is not only a form of transportation but it can also be used to store electricity. Every The New Motion charge point is equipped with the ability to manage the charging speed in an automatic way. To realize the connection with the real-time energy market, The New Motion has been working together with Nuvve, an American company who has already successfully demonstrated this technology in the US. The delivery of the frequency support is the first step. A next step is the option to integrate vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology, which enables discharging of the battery as well.