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Hi everyone,
I’m a young power market analyst in Europe working at an IPP. Over the last couple of years I’ve realized that a lot of “professional” data providers feel pretty outdated and, honestly, painful to use: missing datasets, weak documentation, clunky UX… and they’re not cheap. On top of that, a lot of the raw data is freely available anyway (ENTSO-E, etc.).
At my company, many analysts maintain their own scripts to fetch data. But those scripts often break (API changes, parsing issues, timezones, missing values…), and we end up wasting a lot of time fixing pipelines instead of analyzing markets.
I know a lot of firms internalize this by building their own pipelines/data platform, and for large shops that can make sense. But for **mid-sized companies**, I’m not convinced it’s worth the overhead: it often becomes **expensive and slow to maintain**, depends on a few key people to keep it running, and there’s usually a **big gap between IT and the analysts** who actually need the data day to day.
I’ve ended up leaning on free tools like energy-charts ([https://www.energy-charts.info/](https://www.energy-charts.info/)), and it got me thinking:
**Hypothesis:** there’s a market for a tool that collects the main EU energy datasets and provides them through:
* a **modern, well-documented API**
* a **simple UI** for exploration/downloads
* and **curated datasets** specially for gas/ “ready-to-use” views (instead of everyone reinventing the same cleaning logic)
I’ve built an MVP that fetches the main ENTSO-E datasets and includes curated views for things like **outages** (which I personally struggled a lot with when using providers). It also pulls from ENTSOG and similar sources. Next steps would be adding **weather data**, and longer-term I’d like to add a **modeling/projections layer**.
I’d love to challenge this idea and get honest feedback from people who actually work with these datasets.
**Questions:**
* Do you face similar issues with data providers or internal scripts?
* What would make you *actually* adopt a new tool (API/UI) instead of sticking to your own pipeline?
* Which datasets/features matter most (prices, load, generation by tech, flows, outages, unit-level, forecasts, etc.)?
* What’s your biggest pain point today: availability, quality, latency, documentation, versioning, support, integration?
If anyone wants to try the MVP, it’s currently in private beta feel free to PM me and I’ll share access.
Thanks!