CAISO Real-Time Prices

CAISO real-time locational marginal prices, one row per interval and location.

Prices data CAISO market

Query with the agent

Native record

location x kind x 5-minute (RTD)

5-minute (RTD) publication cadence

Evidence

Observed market data

Published observations from the named source

Time basis

Interval-start records

UTC · event_time

Overview

15.76B rows, 2016-01 to now. Carries price_usd_mwh plus energy_usd_mwh, congestion_usd_mwh, loss_usd_mwh and ghg_usd_mwh — CAISO is the only market here that publishes a greenhouse-gas component. Locations are node (26k — including the TH_ trading hubs such as TH_SP15_GEN-APND; CAISO has no 'hub' kind), interface (the ties), zone (6 aggregates only); location_id joins atg.caiso_locations for the readable name, and kind is carried inline so a hub-only or zone-only question needs no join at all. Every market's real-time price table in this catalog has these same column names, so a cross-market price comparison is a UNION rather than a per-ISO rewrite. Revisions are already collapsed — read it plainly.

Query contract

One row is already the canonical price for (event_time, location_id, kind) — the refresh collapsed the source's revisions. Select the interval and the locations you need; do not de-duplicate again.

Analysis rules

Prices are intensive. Averaging across intervals gives a simple (unweighted) average price, which is not a settlement or load-weighted price; say which one you computed. Never sum prices across intervals or locations.
Do not add price_usd_mwh to its own components — they decompose it, they do not extend it.

Related analysis

resolving a location's readable name and type · join on location_id, and on kind where both carry it
day-ahead versus real-time basis at one location · aggregate real-time intervals to the delivery hour before comparing with the hourly day-ahead price

Interpretation

This is the five-minute RTD run. CAISO's fifteen-minute RTPD run is a different market with different prices and lives in caiso.lmp_rtpd_15m; do not describe one as the other.
At 15.76 billion rows this is the largest table in the warehouse. A query without an event_time predicate will hit the agent account's row cap and error rather than return.

Access

Query from your own tools

Use the guarded HTTP endpoint directly, or connect an MCP client and load the dataset contract with describe_data before calling query_data.

CAISO MCP API reference

HTTP endpoint

POST /api/v1/datasets/caiso_prices_rt/query

Need the full history of this dataset in Snowflake, Databricks or your own storage? Data services delivers it on a schedule.

Schema8

Column

Type

event_timeDateTime64(6, 'UTC')

location_idLowCardinality(String)

kindLowCardinality(String)

price_usd_mwhNullable(Float32)

energy_usd_mwhNullable(Float32)

congestion_usd_mwhNullable(Float32)

loss_usd_mwhNullable(Float32)

ghg_usd_mwhNullable(Float32)

Sample data

event_time	location_id	kind	price_usd_mwh	energy_usd_mwh	loss_usd_mwh	ghg_usd_mwh
2026-10-13 09:50:00.000000	FNTRG1_7_N001	node	48.87667	35.27097	-0.37431	13.98
2026-10-13 09:50:00.000000	FNW_LNODEXF1	node	35.77061	35.26977	0.50083	0
2026-10-13 09:50:00.000000	FOBES_BP_LNODEFMR	node	35.03585	35.27217	-0.23632	0
2026-10-13 09:50:00.000000	FOLSOM_2_N022	node	49.47873	35.27217	0.22656	13.98
2026-10-13 09:50:00.000000	FOLSOM_2_N023	node	49.47873	35.27217	0.22656	13.98
2026-10-13 09:50:00.000000	FOLSOM_2_N024	node	49.47873	35.27217	0.22656	13.98
2026-10-13 09:50:00.000000	FOLSOM_2_N025	node	49.47873	35.27217	0.22656	13.98
2026-10-13 09:50:00.000000	FOLSOM_2_N026	node	49.47873	35.27217	0.22656	13.98
2026-10-13 09:50:00.000000	FOLSOM_2_N027	node	49.47873	35.27217	0.22656	13.98
2026-10-13 09:50:00.000000	FOLSOM_2_N028	node	49.47873	35.27217	0.22656	13.98
2026-10-13 09:50:00.000000	FOLSOM_2_N029	node	49.47873	35.27217	0.22656	13.98
2026-10-13 09:50:00.000000	FOLSOM_2_N030	node	49.47873	35.27217	0.22656	13.98
2026-10-13 09:50:00.000000	FOLSOM_7_UNIT1GNODE	node	49.47381	35.27217	0.22163	13.98
2026-10-13 09:50:00.000000	FOLSOM_7_UNIT2GNODE	node	49.47873	35.27217	0.22656	13.98
2026-10-13 09:50:00.000000	FOLSOM_7_UNIT3GNODE	node	49.14382	35.27217	-0.10835	13.98
2026-10-13 09:50:00.000000	FOLSOM_7_UNITS-APND	node	49.15514	35.27217	-0.09704	13.98
2026-10-13 09:50:00.000000	FOOTECRE_7_UNITS-APND	node	33.81198	35.26857	-1.45659	0
2026-10-13 09:50:00.000000	FOOTECRE_LNODELD	node	33.81198	35.26857	-1.45659	0
2026-10-13 09:50:00.000000	FORT_HUA_LNODEFH14BMAINN	node	35.29679	35.26857	0.02821	0
2026-10-13 09:50:00.000000	FOOTHILL_1_N001	node	49.82721	35.27097	0.57624	13.98
2026-10-13 09:50:00.000000	FOOTHILL_LNODE33	node	35.72123	35.26977	0.45145	0
2026-10-13 09:50:00.000000	FOOTHILL_LNODE63	node	35.72123	35.26977	0.45145	0
2026-10-13 09:50:00.000000	FOOTECRE_NODE1	node	33.81198	35.26857	-1.45659	0
2026-10-13 09:50:00.000000	FORTDOUG_LNODED1	node	35.42023	35.26857	0.15165	0
2026-10-13 09:50:00.000000	FORTORD_6_N025	node	49.3938	35.27097	0.14283	13.98

Coverage

Showing the last 245 days of a 3,939-day history (Jan 1, 2016 → Oct 13, 2026). This dataset holds 16.1B rows — too many to count day by day on every visit — so the calendar and the figures below cover the window from Feb 11, 2026.

100.0% complete0 gap days245 days with data

Show coverage history

Coverage: 100.0%Days with data: 245Gaps: 0

2026

gaplessmore

Related prices data

Related prices data
Dataset	Description
CAISO Day-Ahead PricesCAISO · hourly (IFM)	CAISO day-ahead locational marginal prices, one row per interval and location. 1.21B rows, 2016-01 to the next delivery day. Carries price_usd_mwh only. The component columns exist in the raw CAISO day-ahead feed but are entirely NULL in it, so this table carries no decomposition rather than four empty columns. Locations are node (26k — including the TH_ trading hubs such as TH_SP15_GEN-APND; CAISO has no 'hub' kind), interface (the ties), zone (6 aggregates only); location_id joins atg.caiso_locations for the readable name, and kind is carried inline so a hub-only or zone-only question needs no join at all. Every market's day-ahead price table in this catalog has these same column names, so a cross-market price comparison is a UNION rather than a per-ISO rewrite. Revisions are already collapsed — read it plainly.
Day-Ahead LMPCAISO · hourly (DAM)	Hourly locational marginal prices from CAISO's day-ahead market for pricing nodes across the California ISO footprint. These are cleared market outcomes for future delivery, not forecasts. Comparing the exact same delivery hour and pricing node with five-minute RTD prices shows day-ahead versus real-time divergence. The official source is CAISO OASIS.
Fuel Region Gas PricesCAISO · Daily (gas day)	CAISO's daily natural-gas price for each of its fuel regions, in $/MMBtu. CAISO posts this as FUEL REGION \| GAS INDEX \| TRANSPORT \| TOTAL, and the value here is that total: a published gas index plus a transport adder, i.e. the delivered cost of gas to that region, not a hub spot assessment. It is the number CAISO uses to reference and floor gas-fired energy bids, so it is the fuel-cost input underneath thermal offer behavior across the West. 201 fuel regions are currently active across 27 electric subregions, reaching well beyond California: Waha and El Paso Permian in West Texas, Opal, Kern River, Cheyenne, CIG and the San Juan points in the Rockies, Malin, Stanfield, Northwest Sumas and Kingsgate in the Pacific Northwest, Alberta AECO in Canada, and the SoCal Citygate and PG&E Citygate burner-tip regions in California. Receipt-point regions such as Waha (FRWHA1-3), El Paso Permian (FREPP1-4), Opal, Malin and Sumas track the underlying published index closely, because their transport adder is small; citygate regions are burner-tip costs and spread widely, so they are not interchangeable with a hub price — on 2026-08-20 the 40 region ids named SoCal Citygate ranged from 4.43 to 8.15 $/MMBtu on the same day. Region ids ending in GHG carry a California carbon-allowance adder on top and are a different quantity again. Negative prices are real and are concentrated in the takeaway-constrained Permian regions: 0.97% of rows are below zero, to a minimum of -10.51 $/MMBtu. Rows are stamped hourly, 24 per region per gas day, but the price is constant across a gas day, and the gas day is the America/Los_Angeles calendar date — it steps at Pacific midnight, so daily rollups must use toDate(event_time, 'America/Los_Angeles'). The current gas day is partial until the next 14:30 UTC pull, though its price is already complete. History runs from 2015-02-01 and is continuous and complete from 2026-02-01 onward; before that date it covers 1,972 of 4,018 days in whole-month blocks (February through April, June, September and November of each year), so a pre-2026 average over an arbitrary window is an average over the months that are present, not over the period requested. Hub attribution is INFERRED from CAISO's region coding, not published: CAISO's monthly fuel-region posting lists region ids with their index, transport and total and no hub names at all, and FRWHA does not appear in it — so 'Waha' here reads the id, corroborated by the price sitting where Waha sits against Henry Hub, rather than by a CAISO mapping. Treat a region as the delivered cost CAISO assigns to it; do not cite it as a hub assessment. This dataset is FUEL-COST CONTEXT, not market settlement data, and is queryable from every active grid scope: a question asked under ERCOT about West Texas gas cost answers from the Waha-region ids here, said as delivered fuel cost. The official source is CAISO OASIS report PRC_FUEL.
GHG Allowance Price IndexCAISO · daily	Daily greenhouse-gas allowance price index used as a CAISO market-clearing input. This is an input price, not a nodal LMP or the nodal GHG LMP component.