Electricity Price Planning API

Why does a device need to know next hour's price?

Ireland runs one of the windiest grids in Europe, and on a blustery night wind can cover a large slice of demand. The catch is timing: that cheap, clean power arrives when it arrives, so the smart move is to pull consumption towards it. Doing that by hand is hopeless — it falls to appliances that can switch themselves on: an EV charger, an immersion, a home battery, heating run from an app.

Price is the signal that points a device at the right hour, but the device first has to be able to read it. An immersion cannot make sense of a supplier's tariff sheet, and no appliance maker is going to track every Irish plan — never mind the plans of fifteen countries. Closing that gap is the whole job of this API: it takes a commercial plan, options and local wrinkles and all, and hands back a clean run of priced periods a machine can act on.

What does Selectra's planning API do?

Two things, in order: it pins down which plan the household is on, then lays out what that plan will cost over the periods ahead. Three endpoints do the work:

The qualifying step is worth a note. Rather than asking you to hard-code Ireland's suppliers, the API supplies the questions itself and tells you which answers are valid; your app just renders them. The list of suppliers and plans — the part that shifts constantly — never becomes your problem to maintain.

What data does the API return?

You get back a run of consecutive periods. Each one carries its start and end, the kWh price, the band name printed exactly as the supplier uses it, and the meter register it belongs to — the link that lets you match a price to a reading off a smart meter. The payload also names the currency and flags when the plan is next due to refresh.

{
  "prices": [
    {
      "name": "Day",
      "price": 0.3521,
      "start": "2026-09-09T09:00:00+01:00",
      "end": "2026-09-10T00:00:00+01:00",
      "distributor_reference": "1"
    },
    {
      "name": "Night",
      "price": 0.1789,
      "start": "2026-09-10T00:00:00+01:00",
      "end": "2026-09-10T09:00:00+01:00",
      "distributor_reference": "2"
    }
  ],
  "next_update": "2026-09-10T09:00:00+01:00",
  "currency": "EUR"
}

Which countries are covered?

The feed is now live in more than 200 countries. Within Europe it reaches 99% of every published offer — flat rates, time-of-use bands, dynamic pricing and demand-response plans alike — and it carries on well past Europe into the Americas, Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Oceania, Ireland fully among them.

Add it all up and the API tracks north of 3,700 suppliers and 23,000 offers, with fresh markets landing on a rolling basis. It stays with homes and small businesses, since those are the only customers whose prices are actually published; anything with heavier power needs tends to be quoted individually.

And in detail about Ireland?

For the Irish market specifically, the feed reads the published home-electricity plans of the main suppliers, which adds up to 100% of households in the Republic. ESB Networks runs the distribution system for the whole country, so network charges do not vary by address, and the unit price already folds in energy, network costs and tax. The feed understands:

• 24-hour rates, together with the standing charge billed on top of the unit price;
• day/night plans, whose night window moves with the clocks: 23:00 to 08:00 in winter, midnight to 09:00 in summer time;
• smart-meter plans and their three bands: night from 23:00 to 08:00, peak from 17:00 to 19:00, day the rest of the time;
• the EV plans suppliers now sell, from Energia Smart Drive to SSE Airtricity Smart EV and Electric Ireland's Night Boost (see our EV plans guide);
• pay-as-you-go (prepay) plans;
• the export price for households running solar panels, which each supplier sets itself as a fixed rate.

Two limits are worth knowing. No Irish supplier sells a spot-indexed dynamic plan in the catalogue yet, so the feed carries none. And Northern Ireland is a separate market, outside the Irish feed.

Full Irish coverage, pricing and a test console are on the Ireland page of the API catalogue.

What about ranking every Irish offer? The Comparator API

The planning API answers "what will my plan cost over the next few hours?". Selectra's Comparator API answers a different question: what would every offer on the market cost this particular household, from cheapest to most expensive? It powers comparison pages, switching tools and billing systems, and it is live in eight European markets. In Ireland it covers both electricity and gas, separately or as a dual-fuel quote.

Method 1: rank from an annual consumption

This is what a comparison page needs: the visitor knows roughly how much they use in a year, not when they use it. A single GET call takes the annual figure in kWh and returns every Irish offer ranked, cheapest first, VAT included for a household. For a day/night or smart meter given one annual figure, an optional parameter sets the share of consumption falling at night.

GET /v3/ie/compare?energy_type=electricity&client_type=domestic&car_base=4200&location=urban

Method 2: rank from the smart meter's readings

A smart meter records consumption every half hour. Send those readings (up to a full year, inline or as a CSV file) and each interval is priced in the band it actually falls in. That matters on day/night plans in particular, because the night window shifts by an hour when the clocks change: only a reading-by-reading calculation gets it right all year.

No address, but one question: urban or rural?

Ireland is the simplest market to price in one respect: there is no geography to resolve. No Eircode, no city, no distributor, because ESB Networks serves the whole Republic and tariffs are national. What replaces the address is a single question: is the connection urban or rural? Every supplier publishes its standard plans twice, once for each side of that line, and a rural connection costs a 4,200 kWh household about €78 a year more on the same offer. EV and smart plans carry one set of national rates, so the answer changes nothing for them.

In Ireland the two methods agree: same top three, and totals within 1.5% of each other. With few time-of-use plans and no spot-indexed offers, there is less for an annual estimate to get wrong than in other markets. The readings still capture the summer-time shift on day/night meters, for the same single call.

How do you access the API, and what does it cost?

Everything starts at the catalogue on api.selectra.com, where the docs, a test console and the sign-up all live. The free tier asks for no card and opens all three endpoints across every covered country — room enough to wire up a first integration and satisfy yourself the data holds up before any contract comes into it.

Past the free tier, the price has three moving parts: a monthly subscription for the markets you actually use (one by one, or as a Europe bundle), a per-call rate that tapers as volume grows, and a one-off set-up fee that bundles in technical support up to go-live. The live figures sit on the catalogue's pricing page, drawn straight from billing so they are never out of date.

The Comparator API works the same way: a monthly subscription per market (Ireland is sold on its own), a per-call price, and a free tier of test calls to try it on real data first. Its markets and prices are listed on the Comparator API page. Repeat requests are cheap by design: when an answer has not changed since your last call, it comes back empty and is not counted against your quota.

Who is the API for?

Four kinds of builder tend to reach for it. Device makers and home energy management (HEMS) vendors need the price to decide the moment to switch on. Suppliers want to offer smart scheduling without standing up a tariff database of their own. Flexibility and demand-response operators weigh the retail price against the grid signal. And EV charging operators, whose entire pitch is nudging a charge a few hours later, live or die by getting that price right.

The thread running through all four is the same: none of them wants to be in the business of publishing tariff data. Keeping even one country's plans accurate is a full-time job, and the hard part is not counting the suppliers but keeping pace with how often the options change.

Why does Selectra offer this API?

Comparing electricity offers has been Selectra's trade since 2007. Founders Xavier Pinon and Aurian de Maupeou called it early: once markets opened, offers would only get more tangled, and consumers would need real pricing data to see through them. The planning API is that same instinct pointed at machines — take something complicated and make it usable, this time so appliances can help electrify how we live.

The company works across 15 countries with 50 energy-market specialists keeping its sites and databases current in real time. On revenue north of €100 million in 2024 and a headcount of 2,000, it can carry that maintenance for the long haul — which, when you are handing tariff data to someone else, is really the only thing you need to know.

Frequently asked questions