Live market data
SPP load forecast
SPP's mid-term load forecast, plotted hourly for the whole RTO against realized demand — updated as each new vintage is published, and one click from the live map.
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SPP's mid-term load forecast, plotted hourly for the whole RTO against realized demand — updated as each new vintage is published, and one click from the live map.
How much power will the SPP footprint need this week?
SPP demand peaks at 56,244 MW on Mon, 5 PM, against a low of 32,484 MW — a swing of 23,760 MW across the window.
Every line above, and who produced it.
What settled — the realized values every forecast here is scored against.
The grid operator's own published forecast for these hours. Source: Southwest Power Pool.
Every settled hour scored against what each forecast said beforehand.
The window peaked at 50,365 MW on Thu, 5 PM; SPP MTLF (day-ahead) called it 49,325 MW — 1,040 MW low.
Each day of the window on its own.
Every hour of the window, shaded by load.
| 0 | 6 | 12 | 18 | |||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Thu, 8/27 |
| Forecast | Avg miss (MW) | Avg miss % | Bias | Hours |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SPP MTLF (day-ahead) | 839 | 2.0% | −205 | 22 |
Each forecast as it stood 24 hours before the hour it predicted, against what settled. Smaller is better on every column. Bias is signed: positive means the forecast ran high.
| Forecast | Produced by | Method | Horizon |
|---|---|---|---|
| Forecast demand | Southwest Power Pool | SPP Mid-Term Load Forecast (MTLF) | 7 days ahead, hourly |
SPP publishes the MTLF as a single point forecast with no confidence interval. A footprint this long is forecast against several distinct weather regimes at once, and the error concentrates on days when a front is crossing it.
The mid-term load forecast (MTLF) is SPP's hour-by-hour projection of demand across its balancing authority for the next seven days. This page plots the most recent vintage issued for each hour against the load that actually settled, so the forecast and its track record sit on one axis.
SPP balances fourteen states from the Texas panhandle to the Canadian border — roughly 1,100 miles north to south. That geography is why its load curve behaves unlike any other RTO's: a summer afternoon peak in Oklahoma and a winter morning peak in the Dakotas are the same forecast, and the shoulder seasons see the two halves of the footprint pulling in opposite directions.
SPP carries the highest wind share of any US market. Demand is the other half of that arithmetic: when the forecast peak lands in an hour the wind fleet is not delivering, the thermal fleet sets price, and the spread between those hours is the whole story of an SPP trading day.
SPP publishes this forecast for the balancing authority as a whole and does not break it out geographically — its zone entities are ancillary-service reserve zones, which carry no load forecast. So there is no per-zone table under this chart, because there is no per-zone forecast to put in one.
curl "https://askthegrid.com/api/v1/grid/series?iso=SPP&metric=load_forecast&zone=SYSTEM&hours=168"
Connect your agent to mcp.askthegrid.com and this forecast is a tool call away — the same host Claude and ChatGPT connectors already use.
SPP's mid-term load forecast (MTLF) is the RTO's own hourly projection of electricity demand across its balancing authority for the next seven days. It is what SPP's markets are cleared against, and it is published openly.
SPP publishes the mid-term load forecast for the footprint as a whole. Its zonal entities are ancillary-service reserve zones rather than load zones, so no per-zone load forecast exists to break out — and inventing one from a share of the total would not be SPP's number.
The scorecard on this page measures it directly against settled demand, using the vintage that was genuinely available a day ahead rather than the latest one. Frontal passages across a 1,100-mile footprint are where the error concentrates.
Plotted window Aug 27, 2:00 AM CDT → Sep 4, 1:00 AM CDT. Reissued hourly by SPP; the latest vintage published for each target hour is shown.
| Fri, 8/28 |
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| Sat, 8/29 |
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| Sun, 8/30 |
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| Mon, 8/31 |
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| Tue, 9/1 |
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| Wed, 9/2 |
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| Thu, 9/3 |
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| Fri, 9/4 |
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Darkest cells are the tightest hours. The window peaks at 56,244 MW on Mon, 5 PM, local to the market.