The Monitor answers one question per market: is this market tight right now, compared with its own recent normal, and why. It reads two measured signals, day-ahead price and actual load, for the 23 bidding zones in the European power price index, and says which way each one points.
Price, relative to Europe. Each market's day-ahead price minus that day's median price across the 23 markets. The prices are the same observations the European power price index is computed from, so the Monitor and the index cannot disagree about what a market's price was.
Relative, not absolute, because European prices move together. Tested on real history (1 July to 18 August 2026), ranking each market against its own past flagged a fifth of all market-days as high, and up to 18 of the 23 at once: the same European move reported 23 times. Relative to the day's median, it flags about 4 markets a day, which is the market-specific signal a siting or procurement decision turns on. The common move is reported once, as the Europe line.
Load. Actual total load as the grid operators publish it to ENTSO-E (Transparency Platform item 6.1.A, realised), for the same bidding zone as the price and the same delivery day. It is load, not generation: the two differ by net imports and exports, which in interconnected European zones is large.
Each measure is ranked against the same kind of day (weekday against weekdays, weekend against weekends) over the previous four weeks. A rank says: today is higher than this share of comparable days. It needs no currency conversion, handles negative prices, and can be checked against the numbers published with it.
A measure is high at or above the 90th percentile of its comparable days. A reading needs at least 12 comparable weekdays, or 5 comparable weekend days; with fewer, the market shows no reading for that measure rather than a thin one.
The delivery day is the market's own delivery day (Central European Time for all of the single day-ahead coupling). A day's load is used only if every interval of that day was published: an average missing the evening peak is a different number, not a slightly worse one.
"Above its usual gap" is deliberate wording. A market that normally trades well below the European median can read high while still being cheaper than most of Europe; the page shows the price and the gap beside every reading so this is visible.
Low prices are computed but not published. On days when prices converge across central Europe, a low rank fires on markets within a few euros of the median, which is not a signal. It stays internal until it is shown to mean something.
It is not a measure of how hard it is to secure power for a new project: connection queues, reserve margins and delivered cost are different questions, answered by the PGIQ Rating. It is not a forecast, and not a settlement or benchmark price. Nothing should be contractually indexed to it.
Until 26 September 2026 this page described the PGIQ Global Power Conditions Monitor: cost, load pressure and carbon blended 50/30/20 against a July 2026 base. It never published a value. Its load and carbon legs required more markets per day than were cleared for use, so no day could qualify, and its load leg recorded generation rather than load. It was replaced rather than repaired. The old endpoint, /api/v1/index, now points here.
PowerGridIQ is founder-owned and founder-governed. The thresholds and the relative-to-Europe construction were set by the founder on 26 September 2026 on the evidence in section 1, and change only by published version. During Preview the whole history is recalculated when the method changes.
Machine-readable values, refreshed hourly: /api/v1/conditions. Cite as "PGIQ European Power Conditions Monitor, Preview (PowerGridIQ)" with the reading date.