Forward contracts are important products in power markets as they provide the opportunity to secure prices for certain periods. However, they fail to indicate how prices can fluctuate within these periods, as they don’t capture the hourly and daily volatility of the power markets. This new market price analysis provides you with realistic predictions in line with actual spot prices. We transform the EEX and Nasdaq forward market prices to hourly market prices upon the closing of the market to ensure that you always have the most updated information and most accurate hourly price profile.

Producing Hourly Market Prices

Our methodology for making the hourly forward contract prices include using different price profiles, alongside residual load forecasts. We account for this by using base and peak contracts to distinguish between peak and off-peak hours for business days. Off-peak prices do not exist as a financial instrument and are produced exclusively for this product. Saturdays and Sundays are assumed off-peak due to the significant decrease in demand.

We use our SpotEx price forecast profile to give the respective contracts a realistic hourly profile. With SpotEx forecasts only covering the next three months, we use our Complete Forward hourly forecast to cover the rest of the closing price contracts (e.g. forward market prices in hourly resolution up to the end of 2026). Some countries, such as Poland, do not have Complete Forward forecasted prices, as we do not have a Complete Forward model as of today. For cases like this, we use hourly residual load profiles to make an hourly price profile, as it automatically accounts for holidays and renewables, alongside renewable growth. All scaling curves are adjusted for extreme values before being applied.

We use all available base and peak frequencies for each country to give higher prediction accuracy and merge this into one continuous hourly forward price curve. Starting with the highest frequency available and expanding with the following frequencies accounts for decreasing liquidity as the contract period increases and, therefore, the reliability of data.

Unfortunately, some countries are missing frequencies which lead to different prediction lengths. In addition to the merged hourly price forward curve, we also have transformed the forward contracts separately for the different resolutions (e.g. we have separate hourly price forecast curves for front-week, front-month, front-quarter and front-year contracts). This enables you to choose exactly the contracts that are relevant for you and your analyses.

Below you can see a portion of the HPFC for the Cal-23 contract for Austria (peak and off-peak) and the closing prices for the contract.

Extracting the Data from the API

The hourly forward price curves are available in our API and updated each working day after market close. All curves are of the following format*:

• Merged curve: pri [area] merged fut clo €/mwh cet h f
• Front-month: pri [area] fut front-month €/mwh cet h f
• Front-quarter: pri [area] fut front-quarter clo €/mwh cet h f
• Front-year: pri [area] fut front-year clo €/mwh cet h f

*UK has unit £/mwh.

The HPFC has been launched for: AT, BE, BG, CH, CZ, DE, ES, FR, GR, HU, IT, NL, PL, RO, RS, SI, SK, UK and NP (Nordic System Price).