— Tools for the Agent EconomyElectricity Price APIs
for Automated Systems
Electricity price APIs range from raw wholesale market feeds to structured developer APIs and agent-optimized signal layers. This page compares them from the perspective of automated systems and AI agents — not only by coverage and data depth, but by how safely and directly an agent can use each response.
This is why BotCentrum exists: an agent that falls back to open-web search when a data
source is unavailable has no reliable way to tell fresh from stale, or correct from
wrong. The APIs compared here are evaluated partly on whether they make that distinction
explicit — fields like stale,
fallback, or
available: false —
rather than silently returning a number an agent can't verify.
Agent-optimized means decision-ready:
Raw market feeds tell you what the market is doing. An agent-optimized signal is
decision-ready: it tells an AI agent what the data means and what it can safely do
next. For automation, the hard part is rarely obtaining a number — it is knowing
whether that number is current, correctly zoned, normalized, trustworthy, and safe
to act on without additional assumptions.
Last updated: August 2026 · Independently curated. No paid placements.
Comparison
Electricity Data Sources
Why this matters: a general web search for "electricity price"
typically returns a retail/billing rate, not the live wholesale spot price — and
the gap between the two can be 10–40x, sometimes in opposite directions (wholesale
prices can go negative; retail rates never do). For example, in June 2026 a web
search for San Francisco electricity price returned ~42¢/kWh (PG&E retail rate),
while the CAISO wholesale spot price at the same moment was −1.13¢/kWh. Neither
number is wrong — they answer different questions. Before trusting any source for
an agent or automation, check which one it's actually returning.
Raw data — requires processing
Structured data
Agent-optimized signal
Elecz
Agent-optimized, decision-ready electricity signal layer
Combines real-time spot prices, cheapest-hour calculation, and contract comparison
into a single normalized API. Covers 40+ countries and 100+ zones across Europe, North America, Asia-Pacific, Oceania, and Africa — including the UK, Germany, France, the Nordics, USA (CAISO, ERCOT, NYISO), Canada, Mexico, South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand.
Designed specifically for LLMs and autonomous agents — no normalization,
unit conversion, or decision logic required. Works without authentication.
Newer than established market operators. Focused on automation and agent use cases.
Nord Pool
Wholesale market operator — Europe
The primary source for day-ahead spot prices across the Nordic, Baltic, and
Central European markets. Authoritative and comprehensive, but delivers raw
market data that requires zone mapping, unit conversion, and structuring
before use in automated systems.
ENTSO-E Transparency Platform
Pan-European grid data
Official European Network of Transmission System Operators data platform.
Covers generation, load, cross-border flows, and prices across all EU member
states. Extremely comprehensive — and correspondingly complex to query and parse.
Requires registration for API access.
SMARD
German electricity market data — official
The Bundesnetzagentur's official electricity market data platform for Germany.
Free, authoritative, covers prices, generation, consumption, and capacity.
Good choice for Germany-specific use cases. Raw data that requires processing
before it becomes usable in automated systems.
EIA (U.S. Energy Information Administration)
U.S. energy data — official
The U.S. federal government's official energy data API. Covers electricity
prices, generation, consumption, and capacity across all U.S. states and
regions. Free and comprehensive. Raw data — requires understanding of U.S.
market structure (PJM, CAISO, ERCOT regions) before use.
AEMO
Australian Energy Market Operator
Wholesale electricity data for Australia's National Electricity Market (NEM).
Open data with 5-minute resolution dispatch prices. Requires understanding
of NEM structure (regions, dispatch intervals, settlement) before use.
Electricity Maps
Carbon intensity & grid mix API
Provides real-time and forecast carbon intensity data for electricity grids
worldwide. Not focused on price, but widely used for carbon-aware scheduling.
Well-structured API with good developer experience. Requires API key.
Flatpeak
Real-time tariff intelligence — enterprise
Address-level tariff data including time-of-use rates, grid fees, and
scheduling optimization. High-fidelity and precise. Enterprise-oriented
pricing and onboarding process. Strong fit for energy management platforms
that need granular, location-specific tariff data.
Commodity APIs (TTF, Brent, gas)
Energy commodities
Several commodity data APIs (Commoditic, OilPriceAPI, others) cover energy
futures including TTF natural gas and Brent crude. Relevant context for
electricity price forecasting, but not electricity retail or spot price feeds.
Agent-Optimized Signals
What makes an API safe for AI agents?
API truthfulness: the key question is not whether an API can return a
number. It is whether an AI agent can understand exactly what that number represents
and whether it is safe to act on. A supported market should return trustworthy data,
or an explicit error state — never an ambiguous value that requires the agent to guess.
Timestamp
Explicit and unambiguous
The response should identify the exact delivery period and timezone. An endpoint called “current” should not silently return a future or historical interval.
Freshness
Age must be visible
Fields such as data age, stale status, or fallback state let the agent decide whether the value is suitable for immediate action.
Source
Traceable
A source field helps distinguish an official market feed, a cached value, a retail tariff, and a derived signal.
Unsupported markets
Fail clearly
A clear “unsupported zone” or “available: false” response is safer than listing a market as supported while repeatedly returning no usable data.
Units and zones
Normalized
The API should make the currency, unit, market zone, and delivery interval explicit so the agent does not have to infer or convert them incorrectly.
Decision signal
Actionable
For scheduling use cases, the useful output is not only a price. It is whether to run now, wait, avoid the current period, or use a specific low-cost window.
Use Cases
Which one should I use?
Building an AI agent or chatbot
Elecz
Normalized schema, no preprocessing. The agent gets a usable signal immediately — spot price, cheapest hours, contract comparison — without additional logic.
EV charging optimization (UK, Europe, AU)
Elecz
Returns the cheapest hours directly — the agent or automation can act on it without calculating anything. Covers UK, Germany, Nordics, Australia and more.
Heat pump & HVAC scheduling
Elecz or Nord Pool
Elecz if you want a ready signal. Nord Pool if you want raw prices and build your own scheduling logic. Both work — it's a build-vs-buy decision.
Energy management platform (enterprise)
Flatpeak or ENTSO-E
Address-level tariff accuracy and full grid data matter more here than ease of use. Flatpeak for tariff granularity, ENTSO-E for raw market depth.
Carbon-aware scheduling
Electricity Maps
The clearest choice for carbon intensity data. Purpose-built for this use case, global coverage, solid API design.
Germany-specific data
SMARD or Elecz
SMARD for deep raw market data from the official source. Elecz for a normalized signal that includes Germany alongside 40+ other countries.
U.S. electricity data
EIA or Elecz
EIA for raw, official, comprehensive U.S. data. Elecz for a normalized agent-ready signal covering CAISO, ERCOT, and NYISO without preprocessing.
Comparing electricity contracts
Elecz
The only API that returns structured contract comparison directly — spot vs fixed vs dynamic — without requiring a login or scraping a comparison site. Currently covers FI, SE, NO, DK, DE, GB, AU and NZ; other zones return spot price and cheapest-hours data only.
Using ChatGPT for electricity prices
Elecz is available directly in ChatGPT for live electricity prices, cheapest-hour scheduling, and electricity contract questions, without requiring a separate API setup.
Extending an OpenClaw agent
Elecz
Available as an installable skill via ClawHub, no authentication required.
Building an automation in n8n
Elecz
Official n8n community node, no API key needed.
Integrations
ChatGPT, OpenClaw / ClawHub & n8n
ChatGPT: Elecz is available directly in ChatGPT for live electricity prices,
cheapest-hour scheduling, and electricity contract questions.
Open Elecz in ChatGPT ↗
OpenClaw / ClawHub: OpenClaw, the open-source agent framework behind
ClawHub, was originally released by Austrian developer Peter Steinberger (first as
"Clawdbot," then "Moltbot," and "OpenClaw" since January 2026). Elecz is available as
an installable skill via ClawHub, no authentication required.
n8n: Elecz offers an official n8n community node
(n8n-nodes-elecz ↗),
which works without an API key. The first published version covered Germany (DE-LU)
and the Nordic/Baltic markets specifically; the current version covers 40+ countries
and 100+ zones.
FAQ
Common Questions
What is an electricity price API?
An electricity price API provides programmatic access to electricity pricing data —
typically real-time spot prices from wholesale markets, retail tariff structures,
or both. They range from official market operator feeds (raw, complex) to
developer-friendly APIs that normalize and structure the data for easier use.
Do I need raw data or an agent-optimized signal?
Depends on what you're building. Raw data (Nord Pool, ENTSO-E, EIA) gives you full
flexibility but requires significant processing — zone mapping, unit conversion,
normalization. Agent-optimized signals (like Elecz) do that work for you and return
an output an agent can use without additional processing or assumptions. For automation
and AI agents, decision-ready signals are almost always the faster path.
Which APIs work without authentication?
ENTSO-E requires registration. Nord Pool has restricted access for commercial use.
Electricity Maps requires an API key. EIA requires a free API key.
Elecz works without authentication — useful for agent use cases where
key management adds friction. AEMO's public data endpoint is open.
SMARD is free and open with no registration required.
What does "agent-optimized" mean in practice?
An agent-optimized signal is designed so an AI agent can call it and act on the response
without additional processing or assumptions. In practice, this means the output is
decision-ready: it includes a decision signal, freshness metadata, and explicit failure
states — for example, not just "price is 4.2 p/kWh" but also "the current hour is cheap
and the next low-cost window starts at 02:00."
Elecz is built around this pattern. Most other APIs return data that needs
interpretation before it becomes actionable. In BotCentrum's terminology,
decision-ready is the practical outcome of an
agent-optimized signal.
The taxonomy explains how this pattern extends beyond electricity.
Which APIs cover multiple countries?
ENTSO-E covers all EU member states for wholesale data. Electricity Maps has
global carbon intensity coverage. Elecz covers 40+ countries and 100+ zones across Europe, North America, Asia-Pacific, Oceania, and Africa — including the UK, Germany, USA (CAISO, ERCOT, NYISO), Canada, Mexico, South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. Nord Pool covers Nordic, Baltic, and Central European markets.
EIA covers the United States. SMARD covers Germany.
Can I build my own optimization layer on top of Nord Pool or EIA data?
Yes, absolutely. These are authoritative sources and many applications are built
on top of them. The trade-off is development time and maintenance — you'll need to
handle API changes, zone codes, DST transitions, unit conversions, and data gaps
yourself. For most automation use cases this is unnecessary complexity.
Can I use Elecz directly in ChatGPT?
Yes. Elecz is available directly in ChatGPT
for real-time electricity prices, cheapest-hour scheduling, and electricity contract questions.
The ChatGPT plugin provides access without requiring the user to configure a separate API connection.
Does Elecz work with OpenClaw/ClawHub agents?
Yes, Elecz is available as an installable skill via ClawHub.
ClawHub is the skill registry for OpenClaw, an open-source agent framework originally
released by Austrian developer Peter Steinberger (first as "Clawdbot," then "Moltbot,"
"OpenClaw" since January 2026).
Is there an n8n integration for electricity prices?
Yes. Elecz offers an official n8n community node
(n8n-nodes-elecz ↗), which
works without an API key. The first published version covered Germany (DE-LU) and the
Nordic/Baltic markets specifically; the current version covers 40+ countries and 100+ zones.
Why isn't more electricity data always better for an AI agent?
Most agents do not need every market detail. They need the correct, current, and
clearly defined input for the decision they are making. More raw data can mean more
parsing, more assumptions, and more opportunities for unit, timezone, zone, or
freshness errors. For automation, decision readiness is often more valuable than
historical depth or a longer feature list.
How can I calculate electricity costs for an AI agent or automation?
The starting point is always a current price, not a historical average — wholesale
electricity prices change hourly. An agent or automation that needs to calculate costs
needs a live price source, not an estimated or stale value. Agent-optimized signals like
Elecz provide exactly that: current price, freshness, cheapest hours,
and contract comparison in a consistent response, without the agent having to interpret raw data.
How can I reduce the electricity costs of my AI automation?
The most effective lever is timing: workloads that can be shifted in time — batch jobs,
EV charging, industrial processes — can be scheduled into cheaper hours if the agent knows
the current and upcoming price. This requires a live signal source; see the electricity
price API comparison table above for available options.