Ireland day-ahead electricity price and wind power forecast

Forecasting the price in Ireland

Ireland is the first zone where OpenWindCast also forecasts the day-ahead electricity price. The forecast covers all 24 hours of tomorrow's delivery day, using only information available before the auction closes.

The Single Electricity Market covers the whole island and clears one price that every participant pays. It is set in a day-ahead auction that 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.

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. Hours are the CET auction day, which is the day the market trades, so Irish local time runs one hour behind them.

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

Forecasting wind in Ireland

Ireland's wind fleet is concentrated along the Atlantic seaboard, from Kerry up to Donegal. The forecast covers the island's wind output and is scored against the day-ahead forecast EirGrid and SONI publish through the ENTSO-E Transparency Platform.

Irish wind sits along the Atlantic seaboard, from Kerry and Clare north through Mayo, Sligo and Donegal, with further capacity in the Northern Ireland uplands. It is the most exposed fleet in the portfolio. Atlantic depressions reach Ireland with no land upwind to modify them, so the timing of a front is decided far out over the ocean, and a few hours of error in that timing is worth a very large swing in output. Forecast error as a share of capacity is correspondingly higher here than in more sheltered parts of Europe, which reflects the meteorology rather than the operator.

The benchmark

The benchmark is EirGrid and SONI's own all-island day-ahead wind forecast, published through the ENTSO-E Transparency Platform. Installed capacity is maintained separately, from EirGrid and SONI's renewable constraint and curtailment reporting, because the all-island system does not publish it in the usual ENTSO-E series.

What is published for Ireland

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