Imbalance prices
imbalance-prices
The price a balance responsible party receives or pays for each imbalance settlement period. NL starts on 2020-08-01 local time. BE and FR start in December 2014, where ENTSO-E's history does.
We keep every revision of this series we observe, and declare its gaps rather than fill them.
?as_of= reads show what was known at an instant, from the point-in-time
start below. A backtest that reads with them sees only what had been published by then.
Coverage per zone
| Zone | EIC | Time zone | History from | Point-in-time from | Current resolution | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| NL Netherlands | 10YNL----------L | Europe/Amsterdam | 2020-08-01 | 2026-06-18 20:13Z | PT15M | |
| BE Belgium | 10YBE----------2 | Europe/Brussels | 2014-12-01 | 2026-09-30 08:33Z | PT15M | i |
| FR France | 10YFR-RTE------C | Europe/Paris | 2014-12-15 | 2026-09-30 08:33Z | PT15M | i |
History starts at the date shown, in each zone's local time, and coverage is ongoing. The live status says how far each zone has reached.
Point-in-time reads work from the UTC minute shown. It is the
revisions_observed_from boundary every series response carries, rounded
up to the minute. The API rejects an as_of before the boundary with
a 400. Earlier points carry the final settled value.
imbalance-prices · BE
In BE both fields carry the single imbalance price.
imbalance-prices · FR
In FR the imbalance settlement period was 30 minutes until 2024-12-31T23:00Z, 15 from then. Rows before 2024-12-31T00:00Z are 30-minute; the 23 hours from 2024-12-31T00:00Z are published as 15-minute rows, each carrying its half-hour's price twice.
Fields
| Field | Unit | Description |
|---|---|---|
| surplus | EUR/MWh | The imbalance price for a balance responsible party (BRP) that was long over the interval, having fed in more or taken off less than it scheduled. The TSO pays the BRP this price; if it is negative, the BRP pays the TSO. |
| shortage | EUR/MWh | The imbalance price for a BRP that was short over the interval. The BRP pays the TSO this price; if it is negative, the TSO pays the BRP. |
What it is not
- Not dispatch prices. Before 2020-08, ENTSO-E mostly carried TenneT's upward and downward dispatch prices where NL's settlement prices belong, so NL starts where it carries settlement prices. The exception is 10 periods between 2021-02-12 and 2021-02-14 (UTC), where it carries dispatch prices again. The live status lists them as acknowledged findings.
- Not day-ahead prices. The API serves no day-ahead prices at all, for any zone, for the reasons given on the attribution page.
Freshness
In NL, imbalance settlement arrives in one batch per Dutch local day, so the newest observation is normally between 1 and 25 hours old. Measured 2026-08-16, upstream published at about 23:00 UTC for 44 consecutive days; before 2026-06-30 it published several hours later. That time follows the Dutch local day, so it lands about an hour later under winter time. BE and FR publish each interval within the hour. Measured over the two weeks to 2026-11-01, nine in ten of their intervals reached the API within 45 minutes of their end, our own fetch interval included. These are observations of upstream, not a schedule we can hold it to. We offer no freshness SLA.
Revisions
How often a value moves after it first appears depends on the zone. We measured it up to 2026-11-01, over the periods we watched arrive live. NL revised 0.015%. BE revised 23%, mostly within hours, and FR 18%, typically about a day later. Both revise for up to three weeks. If you read BE or FR live, expect their values to move. We keep every revision, so as_of shows what was known at any instant from the point-in-time start.
Access
The last 31 days of every served zone are open without a key. History before that and the bulk Parquet files need a key. How to request one.
Source and licence
Credit: ENTSO-E Transparency Platform, CC-BY 4.0
What you may redistribute, and why: the attribution page.
Example request
curl https://api.tolven.eu/v1/series/imbalance-prices/NL/latestThe full reference is at api.tolven.eu/docs.