Portugal has around 5.4 GW of onshore wind across more than 2,800 turbines, concentrated in the mountainous north and centre of the country. OpenWindCast publishes an independent day-ahead forecast of Portuguese wind output and scores it daily against REN's own forecast.
Averages across all zones. Every number on this page is recomputed daily from the public record below.
Great Britain has one of the largest onshore wind fleets in Europe, with most capacity in Scotland. The forecast covers GB onshore wind and is scored against NESO's own forecast, published through Elexon.
Every forecast ships with an 80% interval. This shows how often the actual output landed inside it, and how wide it was.
Portugal has the most demanding terrain in the portfolio. The fleet sits along the highland ridges of the north and centre, where turbines are placed on the sharpest local features precisely because that is where the wind accelerates. This is where the resolution of general-purpose weather models becomes the binding constraint: a model reports one average wind for a grid cell several kilometres across, while the turbines stand on a crest a few hundred metres wide inside it. The gap between those two is not something any zone-level forecast can fully close, and it applies to REN's forecast and to ours alike.
The benchmark is REN's own day-ahead wind forecast for the Portuguese bidding zone, published through the ENTSO-E Transparency Platform, captured on the day of publication and then frozen. Metered generation and installed capacity come from the same platform.
One value per day: onshore wind output at 11:00 local time tomorrow, expressed as a load factor and published before 12:00 local, ahead of the day-ahead auction rather than after it. Once REN'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 below and nothing is removed or rewritten later, so the full history is there to be checked rather than summarised. How this is measured.
Because turbines are sited on exactly the features a weather model smooths away. The model reports the wind over a grid cell several kilometres wide, and the turbine stands on a ridge a few hundred metres wide inside that cell.
It means there is a floor set by the resolution of the available weather models, and it applies to every forecaster in the zone equally.
Compare every zone: how accurate are European TSO wind forecasts?
Mean absolute error as a percentage of installed capacity. Lower is better.
The share of days the forecast lands closer to the metered output than the operator's own forecast.
The range the actual output should land in 80% of the time, recalibrated daily.
NESO's published day-ahead 11:00 forecast, a fixed yardstick that is never used as an input.
A forecast of wind generation for the next delivery day, issued before the day-ahead electricity auction closes at 12:00 CET. Market participants use it to decide how much wind energy to bid into the auction.
One value per zone per day: the onshore wind output at 11:00 local time on the next day, expressed as a load factor and converted to megawatts with the installed capacity the grid operator publishes. Every forecast is published in the morning, before 12:00 local time.
Each day, the absolute error of the OpenWindCast forecast and of the grid operator's own day-ahead forecast are compared on the same 11:00 target. The site reports the mean absolute error as a share of installed capacity (nMAE), the win rate, and, where official prices are available, the imbalance cost of bidding each forecast.
Benchmark forecasts, metered generation and installed capacity come from the grid operators: Energinet, Elia, Fingrid, Red Eléctrica, the four German TSOs, PSE, REN, NESO via Elexon, and EirGrid with SONI, mostly through the ENTSO-E Transparency Platform. Weather inputs come from Open-Meteo.
Yes. The dashboard and the daily verification record are public, and each zone's history can be downloaded as CSV from the forecast section. For anything else, email m.sahaf@live.com.