Denmark DK1 day-ahead electricity price and wind power forecast

Forecasting the DK1 electricity price

Western Denmark is its own bidding zone, so DK1 has a day-ahead price of its own. OpenWindCast forecasts all 24 hours of tomorrow's delivery day, using only information available before the auction closes.

The day-ahead auction sets one price per hour for the DK1 bidding zone, and it closes at 12:00 CET for the following delivery day. Every forecast here uses only information that was available before then, and covers all 24 hours, in euro per megawatt hour.

There is no single Danish price. Denmark is split at the Great Belt into DK1 in the west and DK2 in the east, and they clear at different prices on most hours of the year. What is forecast here is DK1: Jutland and Funen.

DK1 is a small zone wired to very large ones, and that shapes the price more than anything inside it does. Demand rarely exceeds about 2 GW, while the link to Germany alone can carry 3.5 GW. Add Skagerrak to southern Norway, Konti-Skan to Sweden, COBRAcable to the Netherlands, the Great Belt to DK2 and, since December 2023, Viking Link to Great Britain, and the zone has more import capacity than it has demand. So on many hours the DK1 price is set by what is happening somewhere else: north German wind, Norwegian reservoir levels after a wet or dry autumn, or how much of any of it can physically reach Jutland that hour. When the borders are unconstrained DK1 simply clears at its neighbour's price; the hours it does not are where its own supply and demand are actually doing the work.

The other thing worth knowing when reading the table is what has changed inside the zone. DK1's solar fleet has grown roughly sixfold in seven years, from a few hundred megawatts to close to 4 GW, against that same 2 GW of demand. The result is a midday block: on bright days there is more generation with almost no fuel cost than there is demand to absorb it, and the price falls, often below zero, with generators paying to keep running rather than shut down and restart. It is followed a few hours later by an evening peak once the sun has gone. The daily shape here is not a flat line with two bumps, and it looks different in June from the way it looks in December: at this latitude there are about seventeen and a half hours of daylight in midsummer and seven at midwinter.

Denmark's own dispatchable fleet is small and mostly combined heat and power burning biomass and waste, so cold weather moves the price twice over: it lifts demand, and it is also what brings that fleet on to serve district heating.

The auction clears once and the price it sets is final, which is what makes the record on this page possible. Each published forecast is written once and never changed, and the price the auction actually cleared at is placed beside it hour by hour as soon as it settles, including on the days the forecast was wrong. The hours are the CET auction day, which for Denmark is also local time, all year round.

The price forecast and the DK1 wind forecast are separate products, scored separately, and each has its own record on this page.

Forecasting wind in Denmark DK1

DK1 is the western Danish bidding zone, covering Jutland and Funen, one of the windiest onshore areas in Europe. The forecast covers DK1 onshore wind and is scored against Energinet's published day-ahead forecast.

Western Jutland faces the North Sea with nothing upwind to slow the flow, and the fleet there is dense, mature and well documented. The combination gives DK1 one of the highest load factors of any onshore zone in Europe. It also means the fleet spends a good deal of its time near rated power, where the power curve is flat, and then moves quickly through the steep section of the curve when a weather system passes. Danish terrain is gentle, so the difficulty in DK1 is much more about timing than about the local wind field.

The benchmark

The benchmark is Energinet's own day-ahead forecast for DK1 onshore wind, taken from the Energi Data Service rather than through ENTSO-E. Energinet can return a revised value for a past hour on a later query, so the benchmark is frozen the first time it is captured and never overwritten. Otherwise the bar would move after the fact and the comparison would mean nothing.

What is published for Denmark DK1

One value per day: onshore wind output at 11:00 local time tomorrow, as a load factor and in megawatts. Once Energinet's own forecast for that day is published it is captured and held fixed, and once the metered output is settled both forecasts are scored against it. Every day is added to the record above and nothing is removed or rewritten later. How this is measured.