Finland day-ahead electricity price and wind power forecast

Forecasting the Finnish electricity price

Finland is a single bidding zone, so one day-ahead price applies across the whole country. OpenWindCast forecasts all 24 hours of tomorrow's delivery day, using only information available before the auction closes.

The Finnish day-ahead auction sets one price per hour for the whole country, and it closes at 12:00 Central European Time 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.

Finland trades inside the coupled Nordic market, alongside the Swedish, Norwegian and Estonian zones, and the unit that sets the price is often somewhere else in that system. Nordic hydro is the clearest example: how full the reservoirs are, and how much snowmelt and rain is on the way, moves the Finnish price without anything changing inside Finland. The forecast reads those cross-border conditions alongside the domestic ones.

Finland is a demanding zone to forecast, and interestingly so. Around 9.4 GW of wind now sits against a demand that runs from roughly 8 GW on a mild summer weekend to well over 13 GW in a cold snap, with Olkiluoto 3 supplying a large block of nuclear underneath. When the wind blows hard into low demand the price can collapse to near zero for a whole day; when it is calm and cold, and the interconnectors are already full, it can climb steeply. The day-ahead price here moves over a far wider range than in a milder, more thermally balanced market, and that is the range the forecast has to cover.

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.

One detail worth knowing when reading the table. The hours shown are the CET auction day, because that is the day the market trades and prices. Finnish local time is an hour ahead of CET all year round, so the delivery day on this page begins at 01:00 in Helsinki, and its final hour has already crossed into the next Finnish calendar day.

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

Forecasting wind in Finland

Finland's wind fleet stretches from the Ostrobothnian coast to Lapland and is among the fastest-growing in Europe. The forecast covers the whole Finnish fleet and is scored against Fingrid's published wind power forecast.

The Finnish fleet runs up the Gulf of Bothnia coast and inland across Ostrobothnia and into Lapland, over flat, forested and cold country. Two things make it distinctive. The turbines are recent, tall and high-rated, so the fleet spends a large share of its time on the steep part of the power curve, where a modest error in wind speed translates into a large error in megawatts. And in winter, blade icing can take capacity out of service while the wind is still blowing, which is a well-known limitation for any forecast built on wind conditions alone.

The benchmark

The benchmark is Fingrid's own day-ahead wind forecast, taken from Fingrid's open data service rather than through ENTSO-E, along with the metered generation and the installed capacity used to score it. Fingrid publishes early enough that the comparison is available the same day.

What is published for Finland

One value per day: onshore wind output at 11:00 local time tomorrow, as a load factor and in megawatts. Once Fingrid'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.