MISO Load Forecast by Zone

MISO's hourly demand forecast in long form: issued_at (the forecast run's date), event_time (the hour being forecast), area (Local Resource Zone) and forecast_mw.

Load data MISO market

Query with the agent

Native record

Local Resource Zone x target hour x issue date

hourly (one run per day) publication cadence

Evidence

Forecast data

Forward-looking values with an explicit issue time

Time basis

Interval-start records

UTC · event_time

Overview

755k rows, targets from 2022-08 to about a week ahead. area is MISO's Local Resource Zone, Z1 to Z10. Zones nest inside miso_load's three market regions: NORTH is Z1 and Z3; CENTRAL is Z2, Z4, Z5, Z6 and Z7; SOUTH is Z8, Z9 and Z10. There is no system-total row: the MISO-wide forecast is the sum of the ten zones from one vintage, counted once.

Query contract

One area, one target hour and one issued_at is one forecast. For the current expectation take the latest issued_at; for forecast accuracy take the latest issued_at earlier than event_time.

Analysis rules

Never average or sum across issue vintages; pick one before aggregating.
area is MISO's Local Resource Zone, Z1 to Z10. Zones nest inside miso_load's three market regions: NORTH is Z1 and Z3; CENTRAL is Z2, Z4, Z5, Z6 and Z7; SOUTH is Z8, Z9 and Z10. There is no system-total row: the MISO-wide forecast is the sum of the ten zones from one vintage, counted once.

Interpretation

issued_at is MISO's run DATE promoted to midnight UTC, not the hour MISO published. It orders vintages correctly, but a lead time from it is known only to the day.
Most target hours carry a single vintage; only recent hours carry several daily runs. Count the vintages for the hours in question before presenting a forecast-error series or a lead-time comparison.

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.

MISO MCP API reference

HTTP endpoint

POST /api/v1/datasets/miso_canonical_load_forecast/query

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

Schema4

Column

Type

issued_atDateTime64(6, 'UTC')

event_timeDateTime64(6, 'UTC')

areaLowCardinality(String)

forecast_mwNullable(Float64)

Sample data

issued_at	event_time	area	forecast_mw
2026-10-15 00:00:00.000000	2026-10-23 04:00:00.000000	Z1	11501
2026-10-15 00:00:00.000000	2026-10-23 04:00:00.000000	Z10	3039
2026-10-15 00:00:00.000000	2026-10-23 04:00:00.000000	Z2	7732
2026-10-15 00:00:00.000000	2026-10-23 04:00:00.000000	Z4	4929
2026-10-15 00:00:00.000000	2026-10-23 04:00:00.000000	Z3	6798
2026-10-15 00:00:00.000000	2026-10-23 04:00:00.000000	Z5	4199
2026-10-15 00:00:00.000000	2026-10-23 04:00:00.000000	Z6	10469
2026-10-15 00:00:00.000000	2026-10-23 04:00:00.000000	Z7	10787
2026-10-15 00:00:00.000000	2026-10-23 04:00:00.000000	Z9	16462
2026-10-15 00:00:00.000000	2026-10-23 04:00:00.000000	Z8	4920
2026-10-15 00:00:00.000000	2026-10-23 03:00:00.000000	Z3	6798
2026-10-15 00:00:00.000000	2026-10-23 03:00:00.000000	Z10	3039
2026-10-15 00:00:00.000000	2026-10-23 03:00:00.000000	Z1	11501
2026-10-15 00:00:00.000000	2026-10-23 03:00:00.000000	Z4	4929
2026-10-15 00:00:00.000000	2026-10-23 03:00:00.000000	Z2	7732
2026-10-15 00:00:00.000000	2026-10-23 03:00:00.000000	Z8	4920
2026-10-15 00:00:00.000000	2026-10-23 03:00:00.000000	Z6	10469
2026-10-15 00:00:00.000000	2026-10-23 03:00:00.000000	Z5	4199
2026-10-15 00:00:00.000000	2026-10-23 03:00:00.000000	Z9	16462
2026-10-15 00:00:00.000000	2026-10-23 03:00:00.000000	Z7	10787
2026-10-15 00:00:00.000000	2026-10-23 02:00:00.000000	Z2	7732
2026-10-15 00:00:00.000000	2026-10-23 02:00:00.000000	Z10	3039
2026-10-15 00:00:00.000000	2026-10-23 02:00:00.000000	Z1	11501
2026-10-15 00:00:00.000000	2026-10-23 02:00:00.000000	Z4	4929
2026-10-15 00:00:00.000000	2026-10-23 02:00:00.000000	Z3	6798

Coverage

No time-indexed data — coverage isn’t applicable to this dataset.

Related load data

Related load data
Dataset	Description
Actual Demand by RegionMISO · hourly	Observed hourly MISO demand in MW for the Central, North, and South sub-regions. Region labels are normalized to uppercase; this is regional operational load, not a local-resource-zone series.
Completed-year `12_dfal_HIST_xls.zip`MISO · year publication	MISO's Completed-year `12_dfal_HIST_xls.zip`. Each row preserves a publisher record, workbook row, or report document with its source member and row index. Source timestamps, units, geographic scope, and revision qualifiers are retained in record_json; event_time is collection time; completed_at is when the entire document became available.
Daily `df_al.xls`, including zonal actual loadMISO · day publication	MISO's Daily `df_al.xls`, including zonal actual load. Each row preserves a publisher record, workbook row, or report document with its source member and row index. Source timestamps, units, geographic scope, and revision qualifiers are retained in record_json; event_time is collection time; completed_at is when the entire document became available.
Day-Ahead Cleared DemandMISO · hourly (Day-Ahead)	Hourly day-ahead cleared MISO demand by sub-region, separated into fixed, price-sensitive, and virtual demand. Virtual demand is a financial market position and must not be reported as physical electricity consumption.