Legal & Licensing

Platform License

Energy Arena is open source software released under the MIT License.

MIT License

Copyright (c) 2025 Max Kleinebrahm, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE
SOFTWARE.

The full source code is available on GitHub.

Data Sources & Attribution

Ground Truth Data

Public ground truth values displayed in charts and browser-visible visualizations are sourced from Bundesnetzagentur | SMARD.de.

Attribution: Bundesnetzagentur | SMARD.de
License: CC BY 4.0
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International

Internal evaluation processing may additionally use ENTSO-E data under the applicable ENTSO-E terms.

User Submissions & Public Disclosure

By submitting forecasts to Energy Arena, you grant the platform permission to:

• Store and evaluate your submissions against ground truth data
• Publicly display open forecast trajectories in interactive charts and visualizations
• Display aggregated performance metrics (MAE, RMSE, etc.) on public leaderboards
• Use submissions for research purposes and platform improvement
• Include submission statistics in academic publications
• Share your forecasts with researchers for academic purposes

Pseudonymous Participation

You can maintain privacy by:

• Using a pseudonymous username: Choose a username that does not reveal your identity
• Omitting personal details: Affiliation is optional
• Email privacy: Your email address is never publicly displayed

Forecasts are associated with your chosen username. If you use a pseudonym instead of your real name, your submissions remain anonymous to the public while still being evaluated and shown in leaderboard metrics.

Privacy & Data Protection

Energy Arena collects minimal personal information:

• Registration: Email address, username, and optional affiliation
• Submissions: Forecast data and submission timestamps
• Usage: API access logs for rate limiting and abuse prevention

We do not sell your personal information. We may share limited personal information with service providers that help operate the official hosted instance, currently bwCloud for hosting and Mailgun for transactional email delivery. Data is used for platform operation, security, and the public benchmarking workflow described in the Privacy Policy.

For details, see the Privacy Policy.

Disclaimer

Energy Arena is provided "as is" for research and educational purposes. While we strive for accuracy and reliability:

• We make no guarantees about data accuracy or platform availability
• Internal evaluation depends on ENTSO-E data quality and timeliness; public realized-value charts depend on SMARD publication and availability
• Evaluation metrics are provided for comparative research purposes only
• The platform should not be used for operational energy trading decisions

Contact

For questions about licensing, data usage, or legal matters:

Contributors

Energy Arena is developed and maintained by researchers dedicated to advancing energy forecasting through open collaboration:

We welcome contributions from the research community. See our contributing guidelines on GitHub.