Voltcast Research
Numbers first. Narrative second.
Everything published here is computed live from the same production database our API serves — negative-price records, capture rates, forecast scores (including our losses), temperature-demand data. If a piece could be written without our data, we don't publish it. Free to cite with attribution ("Voltcast Research, voltcast.com/research").
New: daily guides. One worked example per day — EV charging windows, negative-price watches, forecasting baselines — computed from that week's real auction data. Browse the guides →
European Power Pulse — week 2026-W34
The week of 2026-08-17 across 48 European bidding zones: average day-ahead price €326.25/MWh (up from €314.95), 200.3 negative-price hours, and our forecast scoreboard for the same week — losses included.
European Power Pulse — week 2026-W33
The week of 2026-08-10 across 48 European bidding zones: average day-ahead price €315.05/MWh (down from €339.65), 68.8 negative-price hours, and our forecast scoreboard for the same week — losses included.
European Power Pulse — week 2026-W32
The week of 2026-08-03 across 47 European bidding zones: average day-ahead price €282.44/MWh (up from €210.49), 263.3 negative-price hours, and our forecast scoreboard for the same week — losses included.
We mapped four European wind fleets turbine by turbine — and Germany’s solar fleet cell by cell
How Voltcast turns four national wind registers, Germany’s solar register and 100 m weather into an hour-scrubbable fleet map — with the coverage gaps, physics and licences disclosed.
Ten months of German weather in one circle
Measured rain, cloud cover, 100 m wind, temperature, solar radiation and sunset for DE-LU, arranged by month and delivery hour in one interactive circular year wheel.
European Power Pulse — week 2026-W31
The week of 2026-07-27 across 47 European bidding zones: average day-ahead price €210.51/MWh (up from €192.02), 180.5 negative-price hours, and our forecast scoreboard for the same week — losses included.
State of European Power — July 2026
Negative-price hours, zone price extremes and spreads across 47 European bidding zones in July 2026 — every figure computed live from the Voltcast production database.
Our CI caught our own scorer writing nondeterministic rows. Here's the post-mortem.
We added a job that recomputes our public accuracy scores end-to-end from raw data. Its first run ever caught a real bug in our own scoring pipeline within ten minutes. What broke, how we fixed it, and why we publish our failures.
Capture rates explained: the number that decides every solar and wind business case
Market value, capture rate, Marktwertfaktor, capture spread — what they mean, why solar capture rates are falling across Europe, and where to get the monthly numbers for every bidding zone, free and citable.
April 2026: French solar captured 8% of the power price
The cannibalization months are here: in April 2026 French solar earned €3.33/MWh against a €39.56 baseload — an 8.4% capture rate with 44% of generation sold at negative prices. The frozen numbers, zone by zone.
We reconciled our capture index against the official EEG Marktwerte
Germany settles billions of EEG subsidies on official monthly market values. We compute the same statistic independently and publish the comparison — including the months where we diverge and exactly why.
The Battery Revenue Platform: their paid data is our open layer
Daily BESS revenues per European bidding zone with the stack broken out, an interactive explorer for your exact asset, and the only forward-looking battery revenue forecast — scored in public. History to 2015, methodology fully disclosed, free with attribution.
How much does a battery earn in Germany? The open numbers
Day-ahead arbitrage revenues for 1h/2h/4h batteries in DE-LU, daily since 2015, with FCR and aFRR capacity context — what the buildout wave is actually chasing, from the free Voltcast Battery Revenue Index.
The live map of Europe's power system just got its biggest upgrade
Per-zone live pages, one-click video loops of the price wave, no-account negative-price alerts, a rain radar, and three layers that exist nowhere else free: pan-EU imbalance, Nordic reservoirs and the Dunkelflaute-Index. A tour of everything new on the Voltcast terminal.
The Dunkelflaute-Index: one number for the grid's worst weather
Becalmed wind, dark skies and heating cold, combined into a 0–100 stress score per bidding zone with a fully disclosed formula — live on a free map. What a Dunkelflaute actually is, why it sets extreme prices, and how we score it.
Congestion rent, live: what Europe's interconnectors earn every day
When power flows from a €20 zone into a €95 zone, somebody collects the difference. We put that number on the map — flow × price spread, per border, updated live. How congestion rent works, who gets it, and why FR→IT printed €3.3M in one day.
A pan-European imbalance price map — free, live, on one screen
Germany's reBAP, Belgium's one-minute price, the Nordics via eSett, GB via Elexon, and a dozen more markets — live system imbalance prices on one free map, including the AEP-Schätzer trick that makes German imbalance viewable in near-real-time.
Put live electricity prices on your website in 60 seconds
A copy-paste iframe that shows live day-ahead power prices for any of 40+ European bidding zones — free, attributed, no API key, no JavaScript. For energy communities, installers, home-automation blogs and newsrooms. Live examples inside.
Your climate normals are stale: introducing Volt Normals
1991–2020 climatology is biased cold in a warming climate — at Brussels Airport by +0.7°C today. Volt Normals are trend-adjusted quantile normals per station and day-of-year, free to browse and query, and they move our degree-day settle projections.
Desk 2.0: alerts on any metric, your book, ensemble plumes, as-of replay and rain radar
The Voltcast Desk grows up: edge-triggered alerts to email or Slack, a portfolio book valued against live curves, ECMWF ensemble plumes with calibrated quantiles, an as-of replay scrubber that reconstructs what the desk knew at any moment, and DWD rain radar for solar-ramp nowcasting.
Introducing the Voltcast Desk: a trading desk that shows its error bars
A real-time decision workspace for European power and weather markets — auctions, intraday, imbalance, outages, station weather and model run-drift in one screen, with data provenance and verified model scores on every tile.
Anatomy of a miss: the Sunday our models lost to a free baseline
On July 12, 2026 a Nordic price regime shift beat our production forecasts in most zones. Here is exactly how badly, why, and what a persistence baseline teaches about regime days — with our own losses in the tables.
How we score forecasts without fooling ourselves
Walk-forward evaluation, anti-lookahead feature rules, burn-in labeling and why every model generation — including the losing ones — stays on the public board.
The world's power-sector carbon intensity in 2025
Generation-weighted carbon intensity, renewables share and the biggest country-level moves of 2025 — computed from Ember's monthly electricity data (CC-BY-4.0) across ~85 countries.
State of European Power — the archive
One roundup per month, back through the full price archive. New months publish automatically on the 2nd of the following month; the archive back through 2016 was computed retroactively from the same price database — every figure is a query, not an essay.
2025 (12 months)
2024 (12 months)
2023 (12 months)
2022 (12 months)
2021 (12 months)
2020 (12 months)
2019 (12 months)
2018 (12 months)
2017 (12 months)
Global carbon annuals
One report per year: the world's power-sector carbon intensity, generation-weighted from Ember's monthly data across ~85 countries — and the decade animated on the globe.
Country energy profiles
Carbon intensity, renewables share and the multi-year trend for every country Ember tracks — the world twin of the zone explainers, recomputed monthly.
Zone explainers
What actually drives prices in each bidding zone — generation mix, negative-price record, volatility and our live forecast record, recomputed continuously.
The monthly European power roundup
Negative-price records, the biggest spreads, which zones were hardest to forecast — every number computed from our production data, on the 2nd of each month. No filler, unsubscribe anytime.