Desk 2.0: alerts on any metric, your book, ensemble plumes, as-of replay and rain radar

When we launched the Voltcast Desk, we called it a trading desk that shows its error bars: every tile carries its data provenance and every model behind it is scored in public. That principle hasn't moved. What's moved is everything around it — this release closes the gap between "a beautiful read-only dashboard" and "the thing open on monitor two all day". Five additions, in the order a working desk feels them.

1 · Alerts from any metric, to wherever you live

Every number the desk tracks can now page you: station temperature crossing a threshold, a degree-day settle projection drifting, imbalance spiking, model run-drift exceeding a band, negative-price risk firing. Alerts are edge-triggered — you're notified when a condition becomes true, not on every evaluation while it stays true, because an alert channel that cries every 15 minutes gets muted by Friday. Delivery is email, Slack, Teams or webhook; the builder lives in the Alert Center panel, and every alert records what fired and when. This closed the single most-requested gap: the desk could show you everything but couldn't tap your shoulder.

2 · Your book, valued against live curves

The My Book panel holds user-defined positions — a battery with its cycle economics, a wind PPA, a fixed load, a weather derivative — and marks them against the live day-ahead curve and our forecasts. The desk stops being "the market" in the abstract and becomes your expected revenue and PnL, updating as auctions publish. It's deliberately simple book structure (this is decision support, not risk software), but "what did today's auction do to us?" now has an answer on the same screen as the auction.

3 · Ensemble plumes with calibrated quantiles

The Plumes panel draws the full ECMWF ensemble spaghetti for a station alongside our calibrated quantile bands. The spaghetti tells you what the physics says is possible; the bands tell you what our post-processing — verified daily on /accuracy — believes after correcting the ensemble's known biases. Where the members disagree, markets misprice; watching the plume tighten or fan out run by run is the fastest read of forecast confidence available.

4 · As-of replay: what did the desk know, and when?

Pick any moment in the past and the Replay panel reconstructs the desk's knowledge at that instant: which prices had been ingested, which forecast run was live, what the P50 curve said — with everything published later excluded. No hindsight. If you've ever tried to do a fair post-mortem of a trading decision — "was that knowable at 09:40?" — you know why this exists. It's also our anti-lookahead machinery made user-facing: the same as-of discipline that keeps our backtests honest now answers your questions too.

5 · Rain radar (and why a price desk has one)

The Radar tile shows the EUMETNET OPERA rain-rate composite across all of Europe — 2 km, refreshed every five minutes, CC BY 4.0 via the Open Radar Data programme. For temperature contracts radar is secondary — but for the energy persona it matters: the cloud band crossing NRW at 11:00 is the solar ramp the intraday market reprices at 13:00, and the same logic now runs from Iberia to Finland. Satellite + lightning layers follow. One click jumps from the tile to the full radar overlay on the terminal map. (Updated 19 Jul: launched Germany-only on DWD; upgraded to pan-EU OPERA the same day.)

Also in this release

Every tile exports CSV in one click (Excel is the real UI of every trading floor; fight it and lose). A morning snapshot email can deliver your board's state before you sit down. Degree-day settle projections now anchor to Volt Normals — trend-adjusted normals that remove the systematic warm-drift bias of 1991–2020 climatology (that one got its own article, it earns it). And the terminal itself grew a matching upgrade — imbalance, Dunkelflaute-Index and reservoir layers that feed straight into desk workflows.

The same honest gate

The demo is still the entire desk on yesterday's data — free, no login, watermarked. Live data is the Quant tier; the new Desk tier adds the book, alerts on every metric and the replay scrubber. We gate freshness, not features, because using the desk sells it better than any screenshot — and every model number on it keeps living or dying in public on /accuracy.