Every European electricity market publishes its prices, load, generation and outages in one place, for free. Most people only need a chart or a spreadsheet, not an API. This page shows where things are and how to get them out. All of it without writing code.
The ENTSO-E Transparency Platform at transparency.entsoe.eu is the central publication point that EU law (Regulation 543/2013) requires from transmission system operators, power exchanges and large producers. It covers every bidding zone in the coupled European market with one data model.
It is free, it needs no contract, and browsing needs no account at all. It is also slow, dense and organised by legal article rather than by what you are looking for — which is why people end up searching for it rather than navigating it.
The main menu groups data by type. The views people look for most often:
| You want | Where to look | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Day-ahead electricity prices | Transmission → Day-ahead prices | One price series per bidding zone, EUR/MWh. The same auction results the exchanges publish. |
| Electricity demand | Load → Actual total load, and the day-ahead forecast next to it | Per bidding zone or control area. |
| Generation by fuel | Generation → Actual generation per production type | Wind, solar, gas, coal, nuclear, hydro and the rest, per zone. |
| Wind and solar forecasts | Generation → Generation forecasts for wind and solar | Day-ahead and intraday versions. |
| Power plant outages | Outages → Unavailability of production and generation units | Planned and unplanned, with the capacity affected. |
| Cross-border flows | Transmission → Cross-border physical flows | Per border and direction. |
| Imbalance prices | Balancing → Imbalance prices | Per settlement period; coverage and granularity differ by country. |
Menu names change between platform versions; if a label is not exactly where the table says, the section (Transmission, Load, Generation, Outages, Balancing) still is.
For prices, choose the bidding zone rather than the country: Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Italy have several zones and no single country price. Since the European day-ahead market moved to 15-minute products, a day can have 96 values instead of 24 — average them to hours if your spreadsheet expects hourly data. Today’s values for every zone are on our European electricity prices page and, for the Nordic and Baltic zones, on Nord Pool day-ahead prices.
| Web platform | API | |
|---|---|---|
| Best for | A chart, a one-off spreadsheet, checking a number | Anything repeated or automated |
| Access | Free account for downloads | Free security token, requested by e-mail |
| Formats | CSV, XLSX, XML | XML only |
| Effort | Minutes | An afternoon for the first working query |
The data is identical — the website and the API read the same database. When clicking through exports starts to cost you time, our practical ENTSO-E API guide covers getting the token, the request format and the traps in the responses. Zone codes for both are in the EIC code reference.
We build pipelines that pull Transparency Platform data every day, keep every version and feed dashboards and models. If you are copying CSV files weekly, talk to us.
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