The live map of Europe's power system just got its biggest upgrade

The Voltcast terminal is the free, interactive map of Europe's power system: every bidding zone colored by its day-ahead price, hour by hour, with layers for forecasts, carbon, wind, temperature and cross-border flows, and a time machine back to 2015. This week it received the largest upgrade since launch. This is the tour — and because several of the new pieces deserve more than a paragraph, each has its own deep-dive linked along the way.

Three layers that exist nowhere else free

Live imbalance. System imbalance prices are what a grid actually pays when the plan and reality diverge — and until now there was no free place to see them across Europe on one screen. The terminal now shows the latest imbalance price for 18 zones: Germany's reBAP, Belgium's one-minute price, the Nordics via eSett, GB via Elexon and more, each with the period timestamp disclosed because publication lags differ per TSO. The full story of how we assembled it — including the trick that makes German imbalance viewable in near-real-time — is in the imbalance-map article.

The Dunkelflaute-Index. Becalmed wind + dark skies + heating cold, compressed into one 0–100 stress score per zone with a fully disclosed formula. When German media write "Dunkelflaute", this is now the map that shows it live. Formula, rationale and honest limitations in the Dunkelflaute-Index article.

Nordic hydro reservoirs. Reservoir fill percentage for the Norwegian and Swedish zones from NVE and ENTSO-E weekly data — the single variable that sets Nordic winter prices, now one click from the price layer it explains.

The flows became price-native

The cross-border flow animation was already the most-shared thing we own. Now the particles carry the economics: packets flowing from a cheap zone into an expensive one glow volt-green — that's an arbitrage flow, doing exactly what interconnectors are built for — while packets flowing against the spread stay grey. Every border is labeled with its €/MWh price gap, and hovering shows what that border has earned today: flow × price spread, summed over the day — the congestion rent. On a good day a single interconnector prints millions. We wrote up how congestion rent works and who collects it.

Share the map, not a description of it

The share button is now a small distribution suite. Copy view link gives a permalink to your exact state — layer, hour, day, selected zone — so "look at DE-LU at 14:00 on the negative-risk layer" is one URL. Download PNG exports the frame you're looking at with attribution composited in. Record 24h loop is the one we're most proud of: it walks the scrubber through the whole day while recording the canvas and hands you an MP4 of the price wave rolling across Europe — the morning ramp, the solar valley, the evening peak — ready for a tweet, a newsletter, or a newsroom. And Copy embed snippet gives you a live price card for any zone to paste into your own site (guide with live examples here).

Personal utility: your zone, your cheapest hours, your alert

The map now greets you with a small chip: your zone (inferred from your timezone, nothing tracked), the price right now, and the cheapest 3 consecutive hours today — the single most useful number for anyone with an EV, a heat pump or a battery. One tap opens the full panel.

And from any zone panel you can now set a negative-price email alert with no account: one field, double opt-in, one-click unsubscribe, at most one mail per day. When your zone's auction clears below zero for any hour tomorrow, you'll know the day before it happens — which is exactly when a dishwasher, a wallbox or a battery schedule can still do something about it.

A rain radar on a price map

Toggle Rain radar and the EUMETNET OPERA rain-rate composite appears across all of Europe — 2 km resolution, refreshed every five minutes, CC BY 4.0 via the Open Radar Data programme. Radar on a power-price map isn't decoration: cloud bands are tomorrow's solar ramp, and the intraday desk trades that ramp — now visible across the whole coupled market on the same screen as the prices it will move. (Updated 19 Jul: launched with Germany-only DWD coverage; upgraded to the pan-EU OPERA composite the same day.)

Every zone got its own live page

voltcast.com/terminal/de-lu — and 46 siblings — are now real, fast, server-rendered pages: price now, today's curve, tomorrow's average, the cheapest window, negative-hours context, and the map one click away with that zone pre-selected. Share one on social and the preview card renders the live price at that moment, not a stale logo. They load without JavaScript, which also means they work for the AI assistants and crawlers that increasingly answer "what's the electricity price in Germany right now?" on our data.

Try it

Everything above is free and loginless: open the terminal with flows on, press G for the globe, scrub an hour, hover a border, record a loop. If you build on the underlying data, the same numbers are one API call away — free key, no card, scored in public every day on /accuracy.