About Energy-Arena

Mission

Forecasting electricity prices, load, and renewable generation has become increasingly important for power system operators, energy traders, analysts, and researchers as renewable penetration and market volatility rise across Europe. At the same time, progress in energy forecasting remains difficult to assess consistently: published results are often based on different datasets, time periods, market zones, information assumptions, and evaluation setups, while existing benchmarks and competition datasets are typically limited to fixed historical windows.

Energy-Arena addresses this comparability gap by providing an open, API-driven dynamic benchmarking platform for operational energy forecasting. Researchers and practitioners can submit forecasts for energy time series under standardized challenge definitions, operational submission deadlines, and common evaluation metrics. Once ground truth becomes available, forecasts are evaluated in a forward-looking process and reported on continuously updated leaderboards based on rolling evaluation windows.

By extending retrospective backtesting with continuously updated operational benchmarking, Energy-Arena provides a transparent and shared reference point for comparing forecasting approaches as energy systems evolve.

Why a Dynamic Benchmark?

Most existing benchmark datasets and forecasting competitions improve comparability within a fixed study period, but they remain inherently static. In rapidly changing energy systems, forecasting performance is highly time-dependent: methods that perform well on older historical data may not remain competitive under current market conditions shaped by changing renewable penetration, bidding behavior, and regulation.

A second challenge is operational reproducibility. In many studies, the assumed information set at forecast issuance is not fully specified, and some models rely on inputs that may not have been publicly available at the relevant gate-closure time. This makes it difficult to compare methods fairly under realistic operational conditions.

Energy-Arena is designed to address these issues by moving evaluation from retrospective backtests to forward-looking assessment under explicitly defined rules. Forecasts must be submitted before challenge-specific deadlines, are scored only after the corresponding realized values become available, and are compared on persistent leaderboards using standardized metrics and rolling windows.

Key Features

• Dynamic forward evaluation: Forecasts are evaluated only after the corresponding ground-truth values are realized.
• Operational challenge design: Challenges include explicit submission deadlines, forecast horizons, target regions, time zones, and scoring rules aligned with real-world forecasting settings.
• Continuously updated leaderboards: Performance is aggregated over rolling evaluation windows, enabling ongoing comparison as market conditions evolve.
• Transparent and comparable benchmarking: Standardized challenge definitions and evaluation metrics support reproducible and fair comparison across methods.
• API-driven participation: Forecasts are submitted programmatically through a dedicated API, enabling automated participation in recurring challenges.
• Multiple forecast tasks: The platform is designed for challenges in electricity prices, load, renewable generation, and additional energy time series.

How It Works

Participants create an account, generate an API key, and submit forecasts for selected challenges through the Energy-Arena API. The platform validates submissions against the challenge configuration, including temporal structure, payload format, and submission deadlines. Ground-truth data are then retrieved from external data providers and used to evaluate forecasts automatically once the relevant observations become available.

Results are aggregated and displayed on public leaderboards. Participants may also provide additional metadata about their approach, such as a short description, a code repository, or a link to a commercial service. If enabled, submitted forecast trajectories can also be visualized publicly alongside realized outcomes.

Data Sources

Ground-truth data for Energy-Arena challenges are retrieved from external operational data providers specified in the respective challenge definitions. Current challenges primarily rely on the ENTSO-E Transparency Platform for internal evaluation processing.

Public browser-visible realized-value charts are currently based on Bundesnetzagentur | SMARD.de under CC BY 4.0.

Attribution: Public ground truth data and visualizations: Bundesnetzagentur | SMARD.de. Internal evaluation processing may additionally use ENTSO-E data under the applicable ENTSO-E terms.

Open Source and Transparency

Energy-Arena is developed with a strong commitment to transparent benchmarking, reproducible evaluation, and open scientific comparison.

The source code of the platform will be made available open source on GitHub under the MIT License.

Get Involved

Energy-Arena is intended for researchers, practitioners, and commercial providers who want to evaluate forecasting methods under realistic and continuously updated conditions. By participating, users can benchmark their approaches against other methods on a common platform and track performance as energy systems evolve over time.

Create an account, generate an API key, and start submitting forecasts to the available challenges.