CAISO · Pricing

CAISO day-ahead LMP

Hourly day-ahead prices at every node CAISO clears in its day-ahead market — the NP15, SP15 and ZP26 trading hubs, the utilities' load aggregation points, resources and PacifiCorp's Extended Day-Ahead Market nodes — with the energy, congestion, loss and greenhouse-gas components, posted for the whole of tomorrow each afternoon.

caiso-dam-lmpdaily, early afternoon PT · 1h rows1,907 entities
TH_NP15_GEN-APND
$44.74
2026-09-19 06:00 UTC
TH_SP15_GEN-APND
$43.47
2026-09-19 06:00 UTC
TH_PACE_GEN-APND
$40.06
2026-09-19 06:00 UTC
Read from the Dryos API and cached for an hour; the stream itself updates daily, early afternoon PT.

What is in it

Updates
daily, early afternoon PT · 1h rows
Entities
1,907 entities — TH_NP15_GEN-APND, TH_SP15_GEN-APND, TH_PACE_GEN-APND…
Source timezone
US Pacific — every timestamp Dryos serves is UTC
Coverage
14 September 2026 to now
Rows held
228,240
Primary key
iso, market, node, interval_start_utc
On the map
185 of 1,907 placed — EIA-860M plant coordinates, matched by name within the area the node's energy price puts it in; and the substations CAISO's own price map draws

What it measures

Every value, its unit, and what the source means by it.

  • Total LMP$/MWh

    The hourly day-ahead price at the pricing node.

    lmp_total
  • Congestion$/MWh

    Marginal congestion component — the part that differs between nodes.

    lmp_congestion
  • Losses$/MWh

    Marginal loss component.

    lmp_loss
  • Energy$/MWh

    Marginal energy component, published by CAISO. A few values an hour, not one: the areas in the day-ahead market balance separately.

    lmp_energy
  • Greenhouse gas$/MWh

    Greenhouse-gas component — CAISO's price for compliance on energy delivered into California. Often around $10 in the day-ahead market, where the real-time price usually carries none.

    lmp_ghg

Columns

Exactly what a request answers with, read from the API rather than written here.

ColumnTypeDescription
interval_start_utcrequiredtimestampStart of the settlement interval, UTC. Always UTC — the ISOs publish in local time with inconsistent DST handling.e.g. 2026-08-14T15:00:00Z
isorequiredstringPublishing ISO.e.g. ERCOT
marketrequiredstringMarket the price cleared in: DAM (day-ahead), RTM (real-time, SCED), or RTPD for CAISO's fifteen-minute market.e.g. RTM
noderequiredstringPricing node or settlement point identifier, as published by the ISO.e.g. HB_HOUSTON
node_typestringNode classification. For ERCOT this is derived from the settlement point naming convention: HUB / LOAD_ZONE / DC_TIE / RESOURCE_NODE. For MISO it is the ISO's own pricing-node type: HUB (every aggregate, the eight trading hubs and the .AZ zones alike) / LOAD_ZONE / RESOURCE_NODE (a generator's node) / INTERFACE. For PJM it is the type on the row: HUB / LOAD_ZONE (a transmission zone) / INTERFACE / EHV / AGGREGATE for the aggregate streams, and RESOURCE_NODE (a generator's bus) / LOAD_BUS / EXTERNAL_BUS for the bus streams. For SPP it is read off SPP's own suffix on the Pnode behind the settlement location: HUB / LOAD_ZONE (a load area) / RESOURCE_NODE / DEMAND_RESPONSE / INTERFACE (a neighbouring operator). For CAISO it is the APnode type in CAISO's own reference: HUB (trading hubs) / LOAD_ZONE (every kind of load aggregation point) / RESOURCE_NODE / DEMAND_RESPONSE (a proxy or reliability demand resource, read off the resource id) / INTERFACE (intertie resources) / EIM_NODE (a Western EIM area's node — CAISO's EIMT, which holds the area's plants and its transfer points alike) / AGGREGATE (generation aggregation points, distributed-resource aggregations, flexible-ramp and imbalance-reserve zones). For NYISO it is LOAD_ZONE (the eleven zones) / INTERFACE (the four external proxy zones, the proxy buses of scheduled lines, and any generator NYISO files in an external zone) / DEMAND_RESPONSE (a demand-response provider) / RESOURCE_NODE (a bus in NYISO's generator reference, DER aggregations included) / LOAD_BUS (a bus NYISO prices beside the generators that no generator is registered to — transformer banks and load buses). For ISO-NE it is the location type ISO-NE publishes, a network node refined by the prefix on its name: HUB (the Internal Hub) / LOAD_ZONE (the eight) / INTERFACE (an external node) / DEMAND_RESPONSE (a demand-response aggregation zone) / HUB_NODE (one of the network nodes the Hub averages) / RESOURCE_NODE (a unit, UN., or a storage plant's asset-related demand, AR.) / LOAD_BUS (a load node, LD.).e.g. APND
lmp_totalrequirednumberTotal locational marginal price, $/MWh.e.g. 41.83
lmp_energynumberEnergy component, $/MWh.e.g. 39.12
lmp_congestionnumberCongestion component, $/MWh. Signed so that total = energy + congestion + loss on every row: NYISO publishes it with the opposite sign, and it is stored negated.e.g. 2.94
lmp_lossnumberLoss component, $/MWh.e.g. -0.23
lmp_ghgrequirednumberGreenhouse-gas component, $/MWh — CAISO's price for greenhouse-gas compliance on energy delivered into California. CAISO's LMP is energy + congestion + loss + this.e.g. 0.0
source_published_at_utctimestampWhen the ISO published this interval, UTC. Lets a buyer distinguish 'we were slow' from 'the ISO was slow'.
collected_at_utcrequiredtimestampWhen Dryos collected this row, UTC. Stamped by the platform, not the collector. Together with interval_start_utc this makes freshness auditable per row instead of only in aggregate.e.g. 2026-08-15T21:22:09Z

Read it

Public, read-only, no key and no sign-up. Relative times stay relative, so a URL keeps working.

The newest rows

shell
curl "https://api.dryos.ai/v1/datasets/caiso-dam-lmp/query?node=TH_NP15_GEN-APND&limit=12"

The catalogue entry — every column, its type and the source

shell
curl "https://api.dryos.ai/v1/datasets/caiso-dam-lmp"

Full parameters — bucketing, aggregation, filters and search — are on the API reference.

Ask an agent

The same stream through the Model Context Protocol, so Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor or any MCP client can query it directly.

shell
claude mcp add --transport http dryos https://api.dryos.ai/mcp

Then ask:

What has Total LMP been at TH_NP15_GEN-APND over the last 24 hours, and when did it peak?

Setup for every client is on the MCP server page.

Changes to this collector

A change in the collector is a change in the data. Anyone reading a step in a series is owed the day it moved under them.

  1. 2026-09-14

    First collected, from CAISO OASIS.

    Every other operator here had a day-ahead price and CAISO did not. Reconciled against a live response on 2026-09-14: schema, nulls, primary key, value bands and row counts passed, every node typed, and the four components summed to the LMP on every row. The 445 Western EIM nodes the file lists at zero in every component are not stored.

How this stream is checked

  • Pulled straight from CAISO OASIS · PRC_LMP (day-ahead market) — no reseller in between — and compared against that file before it is served.
  • Null means the source did not report it — never zero.
  • A reading lands daily, early afternoon PT; the interval timestamp is the start of the interval, in UTC.
  • CAISO's market clock is US Pacific; OASIS answers in UTC. Every timestamp Dryos serves is UTC.

Related streams