Indicative prices

Indicative prices, also referred to as 5-minute or real-time prices, were prepared and published by the pricing manager up until 1 November 2022, when real-time pricing went live. Indicative prices were derived from the RTP schedule, which ceased to exist when real-time pricing was introduced.

Price files published during any given day were compressed into a zip file and uploaded to EMI datasets as a single batch job. The zipped-up CSV price files are presented as is where is, i.e. we have not transformed the data or in any other way reformulated it from that which WITS published. We do, however, slightly revise the CSV file naming convention.

Each indicative price file contains data pertaining to a single 5-minute interval. There are six 5-minute intervals per half hour trading period, giving rise to 288 RTP files per day, all collected into the daily zip file. For a variety of reasons, there will be occasions when there are fewer than 288 files per day. We will make no effort to track down any missing files or explain why they are missing.

The naming convention for the CSV files is RTPYYYYMMDDhhmmdd.csv where:

• RTP denotes the real-time pricing SPD schedule
• YYYYMMDD is the trading date
• hhmmdd is the run time of the schedule (see 'Run time' in column description below).

The CSV files contain nine columns and have no header row. Taken in order, the columns are:

• Point of connection, e.g. HAY2201
• Trading date - dd/mm/yyyy
• Trading period - an integer from 1 to 50
• Market time - hh:mm, i.e. the time at which the 5-min interval starts
• Price ($/MWh) - number(8,2)
• Island - NI or SI
• Load area - a 2-character label denoting one of ten load forecasting areas used by the system operator
• Market flag - I for immediate or W for withheld, i.e. a flag indicating whether details were released after five minutes or held back
• Run time - dd/mm/yyyy hh:mm:ss, i.e. the time the SPD model was run to generate the prices.

Indicative prices are made available dating back to 20 October 2018 and, as noted above, they cease to exist after 31 October 2022.