German market data has four transmission operators

Germany is one bidding zone and four control areas, and that single fact explains most of the confusion. This page maps which publisher holds which dataset, and where the same quantity legitimately has two different values.

German power data in one sentence

Four transmission system operators, one bidding zone, and a power data API for almost every series — but published by four different organisations with four different conventions.

One bidding zone, four control areas

Germany trades as a single price zone — DE-LU, EIC 10Y1001A1001A82H — but it is operated as four control areas, each with its own TSO, its own portal and its own publication schedule.

SMARD: the front door

SMARD is the Bundesnetzagentur platform and the easiest starting point. It has no official developer programme, but the charts are fed by a public JSON interface that is stable and widely used.

# index of available timestamps for a filter/region/resolution
GET https://www.smard.de/app/chart_data/{filter}/{region}/index_{resolution}.json

# one weekly file of values
GET https://www.smard.de/app/chart_data/{filter}/{region}/
    {filter}_{region}_{resolution}_{timestamp}.json

• filter is the dataset id (generation by source, consumption, wholesale prices, balancing).
• region is DE, DE-LU or a control area such as 50Hertz.
• resolution is quarterhour, hour, day.
• Data comes in weekly files — you fetch the index first, then the files covering your range. There is no arbitrary date-range query.

Because it is not a documented API, treat it as it deserves: cache aggressively, fail softly, and do not build a trading-critical path on it without a fallback.

Netztransparenz: the settlement side

Netztransparenz is run jointly by the four TSOs and holds what SMARD does not: the settlement and levy data.

• reBAP — the German imbalance price, quarter-hourly. This is the number balancing responsible parties actually settle against.
• NRV saldo — the network control area balance, the German equivalent of a system imbalance.
• EEG data — renewable feed-in, levies, direct marketing figures.

There is a REST API, and unlike SMARD it requires registration: you request credentials and authenticate per call. It is worth the friction — this is the authoritative source for reBAP, and reBAP is what money changes hands on.

regelleistung.net: reserves and auctions

Reserve procurement — FCR, aFRR, mFRR — lives on regelleistung.net, operated by the TSOs. It publishes auction results, demands, activated volumes and, for aFRR and mFRR, the merit-order lists.

This is the dataset that matters if you are optimising a battery or an aggregated portfolio: capacity prices per four-hour product, energy prices per quarter-hour, and enough history to backtest a bidding strategy. The API returns CSV and XML; the field names are German and the schemas have changed more than once, so pin your parser to a version and watch for silent column renames.

What to use when

For anything you want in the same shape as other European markets, the ENTSO-E Transparency Platform covers Germany too — later and coarser, but with one schema across every zone.

Frequently asked questions