Review of the ENTSO-E Transparency Platform

This page provides supplementary material to Neon’s evaluation of ENTSO-E’s Transparency Platform, including all files used for the analysis and all figures in high resolution. We conducted the review for Work Package 1 of the „Study on the quality of electricity market data of transmission system operators, electricity supply disruptions, and their impact on the European electricity markets“ comissioned by DG ENERGY. An updated version of the report was published in Applied Energy.

Objective and scope of this work

The objective of this work package is to evaluate the quality of data published through the ENTSO-E Transparency Platform (TP) as well as the user friendliness of the platform itself. It is our aim to be constructive and solution-oriented such that this work can contribute to improving the TP going forward. This section of the study was carried out by Neon.

About the ENTSO-E Transparency Platform

The ENTSO-E Transparency Platform (TP) is an online data platform for European electricity system data. It was established through the Regulation (EU) No. 543/2013, sometimes called the „Transparency Regulation“. The regulation prescribes in detail which data must be published. The purpose of the TP is to serve market participants, such as generators, retailers and traders. Transparency is meant to reduce insider trading and level the playing field between small and large actors. The TP currently has 8800 registered users, a number that indicates interest not only from market participants but also from researchers and other parties. The TP is developed, maintained and operated by the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity (ENTSO-E), an industry body.

The Regulation specifies a total of 49 data items to be published on the TP. On the TP website, the data items are organized somewhat differently; they are grouped into six categories (“data domains”): Load, Generation, Transmission, Balancing, Outages and Congestion Management. As of April 2017, The CSV files available on the FTP server contained about 35 GB of data covering 2.5 years.

Some data items are reported by individual generation and consumption units. The majority of all other data items are aggregates for geographical areas. Four main different geographical concepts are used: countries, bidding zones, control areas, and market balancing areas.

Six options to access data are available: the website (GUI), the Restful API, an FTP server, a Data repository, Web service queries and Subscriptions.

ENTSO-E has developed and maintains the technical platform and database but does not provide the data. Many institutions submit data; these institutions are called “Data Providers”. There are about 50 of them, including all European TSOs. Data can stem from Data Providers themselves and/or from third parties; the original sources of the data are called “Primary Data Owners”. Exact numbers are not available, but we gauge that there are several thousand Primary Data Owners, possibly including all European TSOs, DSOs, power exchanges, larger generation companies and merchant link operators.

Report

The report is published as an Annex to the „Study on the quality of electricity market data of transmission system operators, electricity supply disruptions, and their impact on the European electricity markets“ and is available as a separate PDF. An updated version of the report was published in Applied Energy.

Files

All files and scripts we have used to conduct the assessment are open source. They can be used under the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license and can be downloaded here.