Fundamentals-based price forecasts for every major North American power market.
E3’s Core Case forecasts cover every ISO/RTO in the U.S., the Pacific Northwest and Desert Southwest, and Alberta and Ontario. Each runs from 2027 to 2056 and includes hourly day-ahead and real-time energy prices by zone, ancillary services prices, and capacity and REC prices where the market has them.
Developers, investors, utilities, and large energy buyers use the forecasts to value assets (including the merchant tail), estimate storage revenues, benchmark procurement, and set budgets. The forecasts are also where much of E3’s advisory work starts: the team regularly prepares sensitivities to the Core Case, nodal price forecasts, and asset-specific revenue forecasts for clients.
New in the 2026 2nd Edition
- Interactive dashboards for each market
- New capacity price scenarios built on E3’s ELCC estimates
- Full 30-year modeled results
- Backcasting to align near-term prices with recent market outcomes
- Updated load, fuel price, near-term supply, resource cost, transmission, and policy inputs
Questions about the forecasts? Contact marketprices@ethree.com.
Resource costs and additional market analyses
E3 RECOST Q3 2026
Levelized costs for generation and storage technologies, updated quarterly
Nodal Price Forecasts
Hourly nodal prices built from E3’s zonal forecasts, available with any market forecast
Interactive dashboards
Standard Package and Premium Subscription buyers also get access to E3’s new forecast dashboards. These are the same views the forecast team uses to review results, and they make it easier to see what sits behind a price. In ERCOT, for example, you can line up a winter price spike with the load, net load, and wind output in the same hour.
The dashboards include:
- Hourly energy prices alongside load, net load, and renewable generation, with month-by-hour heat maps
- Hourly, monthly, and annual average prices by zone, with side-by-side comparisons of forecast years
- Natural gas prices by hub
- Nameplate capacity and generation by resource across the forecast horizon
- Hourly dispatch by resource over a 7-day, 14-day, 30-day, or full-year window
- Renewable generation profiles
A walkthrough of the dashboards
Packages and pricing
Each market is available as Prices Only or as the Standard Package, which adds the assumptions, market outlook, and dashboards behind the prices. For recurring or multi-market needs, E3 also offers an annual Premium Subscription scoped to each client.
| Prices Only | Standard Package | Premium Subscription | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $5,000 per zone $10,000 per market |
$20,000 per market | Contact us |
| Hourly energy and ancillary services prices; capacity and REC prices where available | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Methodology | Summary | Full deck | Full deck |
| Assumptions workbook | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Market outlook report | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Interactive dashboards | ✓ | Premium dashboards | |
| Time with the forecast team | 2-4 advisory hours | Quarterly workshops | |
| Production cost outputs, custom scenarios, enterprise use rights | ✓ |
Multi-market discounts apply to the Standard Package for 3 or more markets. To pay by purchase order, add items to your cart and choose Create purchase order at checkout. For a Premium Subscription, contact marketprices@ethree.com.
Coverage by market
Prices Only and the Standard Package both include every product listed for a market. Blank cells are products that aren’t part of that market’s forecast.
| Market | Day-ahead energy | Real-time energy | Ancillary services | Capacity | RECs |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CAISO | Hourly, zonal | Hourly, zonal | Hourly, by product | Annual, scenarios | Annual, scenarios |
| PNW | Hourly, Mid-C | Annual, scenarios | Annual, regional | ||
| SW | Hourly, Palo Verde | Annual, scenarios | Annual, regional | ||
| ERCOT | Hourly, zonal | Hourly, zonal | Hourly, by product | ||
| SPP | Hourly, zonal | Hourly, zonal | Hourly, by product | Annual, zonal | Annual |
| MISO | Hourly, zonal | Hourly, zonal | Hourly, by product | Seasonal, scenarios | Annual, zonal and scenarios |
| PJM | Hourly, zonal | Hourly, zonal | Hourly, by product | Annual, zonal and scenarios | Annual, scenarios |
| NYISO | Hourly, zonal | Hourly, zonal | Hourly, by product | Summer and winter, zonal and scenarios | Annual, scenarios |
| ISO-NE | Hourly, zonal | Hourly, zonal | Hourly, by product | Annual, scenarios | Annual, scenarios |
| AESO | Hourly, zonal | Hourly, by product | |||
| IESO | Hourly, zonal | Hourly, zonal | Hourly, by product |
Nodal price forecasts are sold separately, and 15-minute real-time prices are available on request.
How the forecasts are built
E3 builds each forecast in PLEXOS. A long-term capacity expansion model determines how the resource mix changes given load growth, resource costs, policy mandates, reliability needs, and retirements. An hourly production cost model then dispatches that system to produce day-ahead energy prices by zone. The inputs come from E3’s own models, including load forecasts, RECOST for resource costs, and RECAP for the capacity value of renewables and storage.
Separate E3 models build on those day-ahead prices to forecast real-time and scarcity pricing, ancillary services, capacity, and RECs for each market. Every member of the forecast team also works on E3’s client engagements, and the forecasts are used on more than 100 client projects a year, which keeps the assumptions tied to what is happening in each market.