There is no application desk: what "applying" means in practice
"Applying for ERE credits" is how people search for it, but it does not describe what happens. There is no government form, no award decision and no queue. ERE’s are units that appear in an account in the Register Energie voor Vervoer (REV) once your supplied kWh have been validated and booked in.
What you actually do depends on your volume:
- Below 2 million kWh a year: you authorise a service provider, which handles data collection, validation, registration in the REV, trading and payout for you.
- From 2 million kWh a year: you can book in independently, or still outsource it.
In both cases the same applies to the account: it is held in the name of the company that holds the main connections, the offtaker. If you work with a provider, it is added to your account as a user. You outsource the work, not the ownership.
The two routes in one table
| Your situation | Route | What you arrange | What the provider does |
|---|---|---|---|
| Private individual with a home charger | Always via a provider | Authorisation, MID meter in the charge point | Everything after that |
| Company below 2m kWh/year | Via a provider | Authorisation, offtaker status, metering, data access | Validation, REV registration, trading, payout |
| Company from 2m kWh/year | Book in yourself or outsource | If booking in yourself: the full evidential burden | If outsourcing: as above |
The threshold of 2 million kWh a year, and the alternative threshold of 200 authorisations for providers booking in home chargers. Source: Regeling energie vervoer, article 9.
What you need in place
These are the four conditions. Every one of them is checkable yourself before you start an application, and that is precisely the advice: check them beforehand, not afterwards.
1. Company details. Your Chamber of Commerce registration and the connection details, including the EAN code of the connection through which you supply transport.
2. Offtaker status on the connection. You must be registered as the offtaker on the connection in the grid operators' central connections register (CAR), and the grid operator's data is decisive there, not your own records. Note: a secondary allocation point alone is not enough; you must also hold the associated main connection or primary allocation point.
This is where applications strand in practice. If the connection is in the name of your landlord, your property owner or another entity within your group, that is the party able to book in, regardless of who paid for the charge point. The same holds for a homeowners' association: the HOA qualifies if the main connection is in the HOA's name.
3. A MID meter inside the charge point. Since 1 January 2026 the MID-certified meter must be integrated into the charge point; a separate meter in the meter or fuse cupboard does not suffice. You evidence this with a certificate of conformity assessment by a Notified Body, or with an EU declaration of conformity from the manufacturer. The full requirements, including the transitional year for companies, are on MID certification and metering requirements.
4. Validated metering data. Your charging sessions must be attributable: which kWh belong to which supply point, in which period. Manual or estimated exports are not prohibited, but they make errors and fraud easier, which means costly additional checking is needed to pass the annual verification. A fixed connection via API or OCPP limits that risk.
What an authorisation actually involves
The authorisation follows the legal entity, not the building. If all connections through which you supply transport are in the name of the same company, one authorisation covers them all. So you do not authorise per site or per EAN.
Two consequences that often go wrong:
- Subsidiaries sign for themselves. A parent company cannot authorise on behalf of its subsidiaries; each company is its own entity.
- Independent sites are not separate entities. One authorisation per company, not per site.
An authorisation also runs for at least one calendar year. Switching to a different provider is therefore possible from the next calendar year, not mid-term.
How long it takes
There is no statutory lead time for an ERE application. Four things determine the timeline: how quickly your offtaker status in the CAR can be verified, whether your charge point already meets the MID requirement, how long setting up the data connection takes, and where you are in the annual cycle.
That last point is the one most people miss. Booking in runs per calendar year, and supplies from a calendar year must be registered in the REV before 1 March of the following year. Starting later therefore does not mean "starting to earn later", but that sessions before your start date can no longer be evidenced and so do not come along. You do not have to sign up today to take part this year, but every month you wait is a month of sessions you do not book in.
What happens if a booking is rejected
Booking in is voluntary but not without obligation. At the annual audit, independent verification of the underlying data takes place. If a booking fails that verification it probably pays out nothing: it is investigated first. The NEa can determine the position of its own motion and proceed to correction demands and fines. Those fines are substantial.
That makes the question you ask a provider more important than the amount they quote. Not "what do I get per kWh", but "what happens when a booking is rejected, and who carries that risk". What else to look for in that choice is covered in how to choose an ERE service provider.
Ready to start?
This is how Voltico's ERE service provision works, from the data connection through to payout.
What Voltico does for you here
Voltico checks in advance whether your offtaker status, your MID meter and your authorisation are in order, so an application does not strand halfway. After that we take over the registration, the trading and the payout.