Two publishers, a clear split of roles and one interface worth knowing — OTE’s direct AMQP feed into the intraday board. This is the market we have put the most work into. That one extra quirk is exactly the OTE AMQP feed.
· Written from production — ČEPS and OTE data feed our CEPS Live and VDT Live Bridge. Verified September 2026.
Looking for today’s numbers? We publish the Czech spot electricity price by the hour (in Czech) in EUR/MWh and in Czech koruna, including tomorrow’s prices as soon as the auction clears.
Source
What it holds
Use it for
ČEPS transmission system operator
System imbalance by quarter-hour and by the minute, activated balancing energy, reserves, generation, cross-border flows, planned outages.
Everything about the state of the system and about balancing.
OTE market operator
Day-ahead market, intraday market, IDA auctions, imbalance prices, annual reports.
Everything about what was traded and at what price.
ENTSO-E
A subset of both in a pan-European format.
When you need Czechia comparable with its neighbours.
The dividing line is the same as elsewhere in Europe: ČEPS is the system, OTE is the market. The imbalance price is the borderline case — it is derived from balancing energy activated by ČEPS, but OTE publishes it.
System imbalance and the imbalance price
System imbalance is the instantaneous difference between generation and consumption in the Czech system. ČEPS publishes it by quarter-hour and by the minute, and the minute data is available roughly three minutes after the minute ends — which is fast by European standards.
The imbalance price starts as an estimate and gets overwritten. During the day you get an estimated price; OTE only issues the final one the next day. Feed the final price into a model as a feature and you are looking into the future — the results look great and do not hold. The estimate is fair game, the final price is not.
Resolution is the quarter-hour, with the minute on top for imbalance.
Publication delay for system imbalance is on the order of minutes; for the imbalance price, hours to a day.
Extreme prices are not rare: in August 2026 the imbalance price jumped above 3,000 EUR/MWh against a day-ahead price of 72. A model that assumes a normal distribution will not survive that.
OTE and the intraday market
OTE runs the day-ahead market, three intraday auctions (IDA1 to IDA3) and a continuous intraday market connected to the European XBID.
Market
Gate closure
Notes
Day-ahead market (DT)
noon D−1
Coupled within SDAC.
IDA1
15:00 D−1
The first intraday auction.
IDA2
22:00 D−1
IDA3
10:00 on the delivery day
Covers only delivery 12:00–24:00. The 08:00 quarter-hour is not in IDA3 at all — its last auction price comes from IDA2.
Continuous intraday
locally H−5 minutes
Cross-border trading closes earlier: H−30 minutes on the German and Austrian borders (since 14 January 2026), H−60 minutes with Slovakia and Poland.
Annual reports contain final values. They are excellent for training and evaluation, but they are not a simulation of what a participant saw in real time. Use them as an input to decisions and you leak information from the future into your model.
The intraday order book over AMQP
This one is often missed in data overviews. OTE offers market participants a direct AMQP interface into the intraday board — the live XBID order book, not an aggregate published with a delay.
The connection is TLS with a client certificate, not a password or a token.
After logging in you subscribe to channels and receive increments, not full snapshots of the book.
You have to build the book yourself from deltas: track order identifiers, handle cancellations, keep the message order.
Messages arrive compressed; for a book with ten levels per side that means tens of megabytes a day.
We built VDT Live Bridge on it — a bridge from OTE AMQP to a live book with spreads calculated against the day-ahead market. It is considerably more work than downloading a CSV, but it is the only way to have intraday data in real time rather than with a delay.
What to take from ENTSO-E and what not
Czechia also publishes to ENTSO-E under the zone 10YCZ-CEPS-----N. That pays off when you want Czechia in the same shape as Germany or Austria — one parser, one schema, comparable series.
It does not pay off for anything you need fast or in detail. ENTSO-E is an aggregate published with a delay; Czech data from ČEPS and OTE is both finer and fresher. We cover the ENTSO-E mechanics in our ENTSO-E API guide.
The practical split: ČEPS and OTE for operations, ENTSO-E for comparison with other countries.
Frequently asked questions
Where does Czech system imbalance data come from?
From ČEPS. It publishes it by quarter-hour and by the minute, with the minute data roughly three minutes after the minute ends.
Why does the Czech imbalance price change after the fact?
Because during the day it is an estimate and OTE only publishes the final value the next day. A model that makes decisions in real time should only see the estimate.
When does the Czech continuous intraday market close?
Local trades on OTE close five minutes before delivery starts. Cross-border capacity closes earlier: 30 minutes on the German and Austrian borders (since 14 January 2026), 60 minutes with Slovakia and Poland. 40 minutes is often quoted, but that tends to be a trader’s own limit, not a market rule.
Can I get access to the live intraday order book?
Yes, through OTE’s AMQP interface with a client certificate. It sends increments, so the participant builds the book from deltas.
Is ENTSO-E enough for Czechia?
For comparison with the neighbours, yes. For anything operational, no — ČEPS and OTE publish finer data considerably sooner.
Czech data, running in production
ČEPS, OTE, an AMQP bridge into the intraday book, dashboards on top — this is not theory, we run it. If you need Czech data in a system someone trades on, get in touch.