Capacity Market Data Providers Compared: Who Covers What (2026)

What data providers cover capacity market pricing?

Capacity market pricing is covered at two levels. The grid operators themselves, PJM, MISO, ISO-NE and NYISO, publish official auction results directly, while SPP and CAISO run resource adequacy programs without a single clearing price. For forecasts, historical series, zonal detail and delivery formats built for traders and analysts, specialized vendors fill the gap: Noreva.ai covers all six organized markets plus ERCOT with seasonal, zonal forecasts spanning 1 to 25 years; S&P Global Commodity Insights, Enverus, Aurora Energy Research, Ascend Analytics and Yes Energy each cover subsets with different granularity, horizon and delivery methods. Matching a provider to a use case means checking coverage breadth, data resolution and how far forward the forecast actually reaches.

How US capacity markets are structured

Not every region prices capacity the same way. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission notes that capacity markets exist to pay suppliers for the commitment to be available when the grid operator calls on them, separate from payment for energy actually produced, and that ISO-New England, ISO-New York, Midcontinent ISO and PJM Interconnection run these auctions.

Four markets clear a single price through competitive auctions:

• PJM runs the Reliability Pricing Model (RPM), settled through annual Base Residual Auctions (BRA) three years ahead of delivery.
• MISO runs the Planning Resource Auction (PRA), held annually for the following planning year.
• ISO-NE runs the Forward Capacity Market (FCM), historically auctioned roughly three years ahead of delivery.
• NYISO runs the Installed Capacity (ICAP) market, priced through monthly Spot Auctions and seasonal Strip auctions rather than a single annual clearing event.

Two regions take a different approach entirely:

• SPP has no centralized capacity auction. Resource adequacy is enforced through mandatory bilateral contracts between 64 Load Responsible Entities, governed by a Resource Adequacy Requirement, a Planning Reserve Margin and deficiency payments for shortfalls.
• CAISO operates under a Resource Adequacy framework overseen by the CPUC rather than a market-wide clearing auction; load-serving entities must show contracted capacity to meet a 1-in-2 peak demand forecast plus a reserve margin.

That split matters for data coverage. Any provider claiming to cover "capacity markets" nationally has to explain how it treats SPP and CAISO differently from the four auction-based markets, since there's no single clearing price to report in those two regions.

PJM: the largest and most price-sensitive market

PJM's RPM covers more than 67 million people across 13 states and Washington, D.C., and its Base Residual Auction results move faster and further than any other US capacity market:

• 2025/2026 BRA: cleared at $269.92/MW-day RTO-wide, with BGE and Dominion clearing separately.
• 2026/2027 BRA (held July 22, 2025): cleared at the FERC-approved cap of $329.17/MW-day RTO-wide, with BGE at $466.35/MW-day and Dominion at $444.26/MW-day, procuring 134,311 MW of unforced capacity (UCAP).
• 2027/2028 BRA (results announced December 17, 2025): cleared again at the price cap, $333.44/MW-day UCAP RTO-wide, up 1.3% from the prior auction, procuring 134,479 MW for the delivery year running June 1, 2027 through May 31, 2028. Combined with Fixed Resource Requirement capacity, the result still left PJM 6,623 MW short of its full reliability target. The cleared mix was 43% natural gas, 21% nuclear, 20% coal, 5% demand response, 4% hydro, 2% wind, 2% oil and 1% solar.

Three consecutive auctions clearing at or near the cap is unusual for a market historically priced well below it, and it's the reason PJM dominates most conversations about US capacity markets among traders and developers right now.

ISO-NE: a market paused mid-reform

ISO-NE's most recently completed Forward Capacity Auction, FCA 18, was held on February 5, 2024, clearing at $3.58/kW-month across all zones and import interfaces and securing 31,556 MW for the 2027-2028 capacity commitment period.

FCA 19 has not happened since. ISO-NE and NEPOOL first won FERC approval to delay it to February 2026 so the region could complete a resource capacity accreditation study, then requested and received a further two-year delay to February 2028, timed to land just months before the relevant delivery period begins in June 2028. The delay supports a broader overhaul, Capacity Auction Reforms (CAR), that would convert the FCM from a forward/annual market to a prompt/seasonal one with new accreditation rules. The first component, CAR-PD, was accepted by FERC on March 30, 2026; the second, CAR-SA, is expected to be filed in the fourth quarter of 2026.

Practically, that means anyone tracking New England capacity has gone roughly four years between cleared auctions, a gap that puts extra weight on interim ISO-NE filings and vendor scenario modeling rather than a fresh clearing price.

MISO: the widest year-over-year price swings of any US market

MISO's Planning Resource Auction has produced the sharpest volatility of any organized capacity market in recent years:

• 2024/25 planning year: cleared at roughly $21/MW-day annualized.
• 2025/26 planning year (results posted May 29, 2025): summer capacity cleared at $666.50/MW-day uniformly across all zones, the highest in the region's history and roughly 22 times the prior summer price; the annualized clearing price reached $217/MW-day, about ten times the 2024/25 level.
• 2026/27 planning year (results released April 28, 2026): summer capacity eased to $424.30/MW-day in the North/Central subregion, with Arkansas-Mississippi at $384.10/MW-day and Louisiana-Texas at $412.10/MW-day. Annualized prices settled between $116 and $126/MW-day depending on zone, down as much as 42% from the prior year's record.

The 2026/27 auction cleared with summer margins running about 3.5 percentage points above the 7.9% planning reserve margin target, and solar capacity jumped 59% year over year to 12.2 GW cleared, while battery storage rose to 893.8 MW. That combination, price relief alongside a fast-changing resource mix, is exactly the kind of shift that raw auction results alone don't explain; it requires the underlying build-out and accreditation data that forecasting platforms track between auctions.

NYISO: monthly pricing with an emerging capacity tightness

Unlike PJM, MISO or ISO-NE, NYISO's Installed Capacity market doesn't clear once a year. Load-serving entities meet their obligations through monthly Spot Auctions and seasonal Strip auctions across two capability periods, Summer (May through October) and Winter (November through April), so the reference price changes every month rather than staying fixed for a full delivery year.

That structure is being tested going into summer 2026. NYISO has flagged a potential capacity deficiency in New York City for the first time in recent memory, tied to the Champlain Hudson Power Express, a 1,250 MW HVDC transmission line, being named a "Triggering Resource" for the 2026-2027 capability year. Because the required notice wasn't filed by the March 2 deadline, CHPE-Out parameters took effect starting in May 2026. If the deficiency is confirmed, NYISO must run a supplemental procurement, and any load-serving entity still short would pay a supplemental fee equal to the spot clearing price multiplied by its deficiency.

Monthly clearing plus an active deficiency process makes NYISO one of the harder capacity markets to track manually, since a single annual number won't capture what's actually happening zone by zone.

Comparing the data providers

The table below compares providers against five criteria that matter for capacity market work: which markets they cover, how granular the data is, how far the forecast horizon extends, whether they model multiple scenarios, and how the data is delivered.

Provider	Market coverage	Granularity	Forecast horizon	Scenario modeling	Delivery / API
Noreva.ai	PJM, MISO, SPP, ISO-NE, NYISO, CAISO and ERCOT	Zonal capacity views with accredited capacity and reserve margins, split by season	1-5 year auction-focused forecasts plus 25-year long-term curves	Multiple scenarios per market, ranging from conservative to aggressive resource build-out	API, CSV downloads, Noreva Data Hub
S&P Global Commodity Insights	Power forward curves across 80+ North American locations, with capacity market coverage delivered mainly through research and news on PJM, MISO and ISO-NE	Hub-level peak/off-peak forward curves (Platts M2MS-Power); capacity treated as research and analysis rather than a standing zonal curve	Daily 10-year and semi-monthly curves out to 20 years)	Primarily qualitative, in research notes rather than a packaged scenario tool	Platts Market Data feeds, Capital IQ Pro
Enverus	ISO-wide power data across ERCOT, SPP, PJM and MISO via MarketView; capacity market economics covered by Enverus Intelligence Research	Nodal and zonal LMP, congestion and generation data; capacity coverage is analytical rather than a dedicated forward curve	Real-time through multi-year outlook reports	Ad hoc, published within research reports such as its PJM capacity market analysis	PowerBI delivery, MarketView platform, data catalog
Aurora Energy Research	North American power markets spanning WECC, the Eastern Interconnection and ERCOT	Market- and asset-level outcomes modeled through the Origin software	Multi-year, updated yearly	Origin explores multiple market-outcome scenarios under different policy and build assumptions	EOS platform bundling software, data and forecast reports
Ascend Analytics	Major US ISOs (plus European markets) via AscendMI	Sub-hourly power prices alongside capacity, ancillary services, RECs and nodal basis	20+ year forecasts	PowerSIMM supports capacity expansion and reliability-constrained scenario modeling	AscendMI platform, PowerVAL, PowerSIMM
Yes Energy	All North American ISOs/RTOs, with dedicated annual capacity price forecasts for PJM and New York	Nodal and zonal LMP plus demand-curve-based capacity forecasts using the same downward-sloping methodology PJM and NYISO apply	Historical data back to each ISO's inception through real-time; annual capacity forecasts	Demand-curve modeling specific to PJM and NY capacity auctions	ICE Data API, bulk file services

What to check before picking a provider

• Coverage match: confirm the provider actually prices the ISOs you trade or develop in, and how it handles SPP and CAISO, which don't have a single clearing price to report.
• Granularity: zonal or nodal detail matters more in PJM (LDA-specific pricing like BGE and Dominion) and MISO (zone-specific summer prices) than in single-price markets.
• Forecast horizon: a 3-year view covers the next couple of BRAs; project financing and long-term valuation work needs multi-decade curves, which is where platforms offering 20+ year forecasts diverge sharply from providers built around near-term price discovery.
• Scenario modeling: with ISO-NE's FCM under active reform and MISO's accreditation rules evolving, single-point forecasts age quickly; scenario ranges are more useful for stress-testing a position or asset valuation.
• Delivery format: API and bulk-file access matter for automated trading and risk systems; dashboard-only access is usually enough for research and compliance reporting.

Most trading desks end up combining sources: official ISO filings for the auctions that have actually cleared, plus a forecasting vendor for the years before the next auction and the scenario work official filings don't provide. For a broader look at how PJM, MISO, ISO-NE and NYISO auction pricing compares across delivery years, the capacity markets hub tracks results as they're released.

FAQ

Does PJM publish its own capacity auction results for free?

Yes. PJM posts official Base Residual Auction reports, including RTO-wide and zone-specific clearing prices, directly on pjm.com after each auction. What PJM doesn't provide is a multi-year forecast beyond the next scheduled auction or scenario modeling, which is where third-party data providers add value.

What's the difference between a capacity market and a resource adequacy program?

Capacity markets like PJM's RPM, MISO's PRA, ISO-NE's FCM and NYISO's ICAP clear a competitive auction price that all qualifying suppliers receive. Resource adequacy programs, used by SPP and CAISO, instead require load-serving entities to contract for enough capacity bilaterally, with no single market-clearing price published.

Why hasn't ISO-NE held a capacity auction since 2024?

FCA 18 cleared in February 2024. ISO-NE has since delayed FCA 19 twice, first to February 2026 and then to February 2028, to complete a resource capacity accreditation study and implement Capacity Auction Reforms that shift the FCM to a prompt/seasonal structure. The first reform component was accepted by FERC on March 30, 2026.

Which capacity market has moved the most in the past two years?

MISO. Its annualized clearing price rose from about $21/MW-day for planning year 2024/25 to $217/MW-day for 2025/26, a roughly tenfold jump, before easing to $116-$126/MW-day for 2026/27 as new solar and battery capacity cleared. Summer-specific prices swung even more sharply, from record highs above $660/MW-day down to the $380-$425/MW-day range.

Can data providers forecast capacity prices beyond the next scheduled auction?

Yes, several platforms extend well past the next auction. Ascend Analytics publishes 20-plus-year forecasts through AscendMI, and Noreva.ai pairs 1-5 year auction-focused forecasts with 25-year long-term scenario curves for project financing and long-term valuation work. Coverage and methodology vary, so it's worth checking which specific ISOs and zones each long-term forecast actually models before relying on it.