On a typical business park in Brabant, eight entrepreneurs sit around a table. Three want to expand, two want to start charging electric trucks, one has a roof full of solar panels he can no longer feed back to the grid, and the remaining two are present mainly because their request for a heavier connection has been queued at network operator Enexis for eighteen months. The operator has told them that no individual solution should be expected. A collective one is possible — and for that, one party needs to lead the conversation. Not the network operator, not the municipality, and preferably not the largest off-taker at the table either.

This has become the daily reality of the Dutch electricity grid in 2026. The Energy Act that took effect on 1 January 2026 formally enables group contracts. From 1 July 2026, households and smaller businesses will join a single waiting list under the regulator’s new societal prioritisation framework. And in a recent report ABN AMRO argues explicitly that scaling up energy hubs and deploying “stroomkoppelaars” — facilitators who bring businesses together — should be recognised as a core track alongside building additional grid infrastructure.

What stays implicit in all of these documents is that the coordinator is the most critical and at the same time most underestimated function in the chain. The six steps below summarise what that role looks like in practice — and where things usually go wrong.

1. Start with an honest demand-profile analysis, not a procurement document

The temptation is to move quickly to a legal structure or a battery supplier. That does not work. The first piece of work, per participant, is to lay out the contracted connection capacity, the actual consumption per fifteen-minute interval over a full year, the expansion plans for the next three years, and — equally important — the willingness to shift or curtail one’s own consumption.

In almost every hub it turns out that installed capacity is generous but simultaneity is low. A logistics firm charging trucks between 02:00 and 06:00 barely conflicts with a manufacturing site running at peak load between 07:00 and 16:00. Only once those profiles are on the table do you know whether there is anything to coordinate at all. The knowledge base at energiehubs.nl provides usable templates.

2. Decide early whether it will be a GTO or a G-CBC — that choice determines who owns the problem

A group transport agreement (GTO) gives the hub a fixed amount of transport capacity at the existing connection point, which the participants divide among themselves. A group capacity-limiting contract (G-CBC) is in essence a service to the network operator: the hub commits to curtail or shift load at peak moments in exchange for compensation.

The difference looks technical but is governance-defining. Under a GTO the hub owns the scarcity problem and must internally enforce who is allowed what. Under a G-CBC the network operator continues to decide when curtailment is required, and the hub mainly carries the operational risk. The ACM anchored group contracts in regulation in 2025; from 1 January 2027 network operators will be required to actively offer them. Anyone who postpones this choice until after the legal entity is established does the work twice.

3. Design the governance first, then the technology

The most common pitfall is that technical design and governance design become separate tracks. The outcome is predictable: the battery is in place, the energy management system works, and then it turns out there is no decision-making mechanism for what happens when participant X structurally consumes more than agreed.

In practice, a light cooperative form with an independent chair or director works best. None of the participants should be able to block decisions about another participant’s capacity allocation. Voting rules, escalation paths and dispute resolution belong on the table before the connection goes live, not after. This is classical stakeholder and environmental management work: not designing the connection, but designing the cooperation.

4. Engage the municipality before the design is finished, not after

An energy hub touches municipal policy on several fronts: permits for battery storage, parking arrangements for charging infrastructure, spatial integration of a transformer cabinet, sometimes a zoning amendment. Waiting until the design is finished routinely adds six to twelve months of delay to a process that is already time-critical.

Here too the coordinator is the right party to lead this conversation — not the individual participant who happens to have the most recent permit application. The province can offer support through a hub coordinator; in several provinces this is now a standing point of contact. Use it.

5. Settle the allocation rules while they are still hypothetical

What happens when one participant unexpectedly expands? When a new entrant wants to join? When the battery turns out to be profitable a year earlier than projected — who gets the surplus? What if a participant goes bankrupt?

These conversations are painful to hold once the problem is real and relatively easy when everything is still hypothetical. The coordinator’s job is to put them on the agenda actively, in advance. Experience from hubs such as the Kempisch Bedrijvenpark shows that what participants value most, in hindsight, is that the rules were in place before they were needed.

6. Build the metering and accountability layer as a core element, not a by-product

A GTO or G-CBC only works if it is transparent per fifteen-minute interval who consumed what. The network operator bills the collective; internal allocation is the hub’s responsibility. Without a shared energy management system and a clear allocation methodology, disputes will arise within a year about who used too much during which peak.

The coordinator must demand from day one that the metering infrastructure, allocation rules and billing model are watertight — if necessary by engaging an independent party to fulfil this role on a structural basis. This is not glamorous work, but without this foundation a hub is fragile at the first disagreement.

What this means in practice

The Dutch approach to grid congestion is shifting decisively from an individual to a collective problem. Business parks, residential areas and mixed zones will increasingly be required to negotiate with the network operator as a single unit. This is not an energy issue in the classical sense — it is a coordination issue, for which the work looks identical to any other area-based process: stakeholders mapped, interests on the table, governance arranged in advance, and the patience to keep talking while the issues are still hypothetical.

For stakeholder and environmental managers this is a logical new field of work. The toolkit is familiar; the subject matter is not. The question is not whether energy hubs will arrive — they already have. The question is who can forge them into a working collective.

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