01
Location Screen
An assessment of 3–5 sites you’re weighing, against one brief. Available capacity, connection window, refusal density, a ranking, questions for the operator. 10 working days, fixed price.
This is the first step.
ftCEE RESEARCH PROGRAMME
FirmMW measures the availability of power, not its price.
FirmMW is a research programme inside ftCEE. It answers a question Poland has no reliable source for today: where power is actually available, when it can be connected, and what a firm megawatt really costs at a specific location.
This is not an energy-price service, and it is not consulting. It is a maintained body of evidence about the Polish grid — available connection capacity substation by substation, realised connection timelines, refusal density, operators’ development plans — from which we assemble an assessment of a single site.
The name comes from the question the programme solves: what it costs, and how to secure, a firm MW — a megawatt that is there when you need it, in the place you want to build.
THE QUESTION
Three questions, one source.
Anyone planning a large load — a data centre, a plant electrification, a battery — has to answer three questions before choosing a site. Today each is settled separately, on data that doesn’t fit it.
- Where? Which of the sites you’re weighing can the grid actually accept your capacity.
- When? How long it will take from application to first supply — not by the statutory deadline, but by what actually happened at that operator.
- How much? What a firm megawatt costs once you add everything that separates the contract headline from power delivered to a 24/7 load.
No one in Poland answers these three together. FirmMW is built to do exactly that.
A DIFFERENT INSTRUMENT
A futures contract tells you what power will cost. It doesn’t tell you whether you’ll get it.
An energy futures contract or a PPA is a financial instrument on price. It does one thing very well: it locks the cost of a megawatt-hour years ahead and takes price risk off the budget. If your problem is wholesale price volatility, that is the right tool — and FirmMW does not replace it.
But when you’re building a large load, the binding constraint is not price. It’s the queue. You can hedge the price to the cent and still spend two years waiting to connect — because a futures contract does not get you a physical grid connection. Nor does it tell you whether this particular substation will accept 20 MW, or when. And the price you locked is the exchange price at a market hub — not the €92 a firm megawatt actually lands at, under your hall.
These are two different instruments for two different questions. A futures contract manages price over time. FirmMW settles availability in place and time, and computes the full delivered cost the exchange price leaves out. One does not replace the other. But get the order wrong — lock the price before you’ve checked where and when you can connect — and you can end up with a perfect hedge on power you have no way to take.
| Futures / price PPA | FirmMW | |
|---|---|---|
| What it answers | What a megawatt-hour will cost | Where, when and at what cost you secure a firm megawatt |
| Nature | Financial — an instrument on price | Physical — an assessment of availability and connection |
| Unit of reference | Market price at a hub | A specific substation and connection node |
| Binding constraint | Price volatility | The connection queue and timing |
| What it puts in your hands | A locked cost | The decision of where to build, and a real connection window |
| What it won’t do | Won’t get you connected or pick your site | Won’t lock your energy price |
| The cost it shows | The exchange price of energy | The full cost of firm power: shape, firming, balancing, guarantees of origin, network charges |
THE KNOWLEDGE
Knowledge that can’t be bought ready-made.
FirmMW rests on four datasets. Three can be reconstructed from public sources — useful, but not an advantage. The fourth is the advantage, because it compounds by calendar time and exists nowhere else.
- Grid project database Operators’ investments: lines, substations, upgrades, schedules, delays. OBSERVEDREPORTED
- Large load database Who is applying for how much capacity, where, and at what stage of connection. OBSERVED
- Firm power cost model Assembling the delivered price from seven components: energy, shape, firming, balancing, guarantees of origin, capacity market, network charges. CALCULATEDESTIMATED
- Connection outcome database Application date, requested capacity, original date, revised date, outcome, realised delay. This is the set that cannot be built from public sources. OBSERVED
Operators publish available capacity every quarter — and each publication overwrites the last. No one archives these files. We archive them from day one, dated and checksummed. After a year we hold a time series of connection-capacity availability in Poland that cannot be bought or reconstructed backwards. Anyone who starts collecting a year after us is a year behind, permanently.
THE VALUE
The same decision, made on evidence instead of instinct.
The value of FirmMW comes down to one thing: the difference in quality of a siting decision worth hundreds of millions. Below is the “before” and the “after”.
| Before | After |
|---|---|
| A shortlist from land, incentives and a hunch about the grid | A shortlist ranked by real capacity availability and a credible connection date |
| Energy price in the model = the contract headline | Firm power cost split into seven components, each with a grade of evidence |
| “The operator says it should work” | The distribution of realised connection times for that operator and that class of substation |
| Grid risk as a paragraph in the memo | Grid risk as a numeric component with disclosed weights |
−54 MW
how much available capacity can vanish at one substation in a single quarter
CALCULATED
3.4 years
the median time from connection conditions to first supply
CALCULATED
~€6.5M / year
the gap between the PPA headline and the cost of firm power at 20 MW
CALCULATED
Example: a substation with 118 MW available, hit by two applications of 24 and 30 MW, suddenly has 64 — 118 − 24 − 30. If you need 20 MW, your headroom over the queue dropped from five-fold to three-fold in one quarter — and no energy price contract will ever tell you that.
METHOD AND INDEPENDENCE
Every number carries its grade of evidence.
ftCEE is just getting started, and we don’t pretend to a track record we don’t have. What FirmMW’s credibility rests on from day one is method, not a client count. We publish what can be observed, compute what can be computed, and label the rest with one of five grades of evidence — and never mix a fact with an estimate in the same sentence.
We do not broker electricity, sell projects or earn transaction commissions. Our only product is the assessment. It is the only position from which you can state a number someone will underwrite for ten years.
- OBSERVEDverified in source
- REPORTEDstated by a third party
- CALCULATEDcomputed from disclosed inputs
- ESTIMATEDestimate with assumptions
- SCENARIOconditional construction, not a forecast
HOW TO USE IT
Start with one decision, not a transformation.
FirmMW can be bought at three levels. Each makes sense only after the one before — we don’t sell monitoring to someone who hasn’t yet seen how our data moves.
02
Location Assessment
A full assessment of one chosen site, with the firm power cost model and scenarios. A section ready for the investment memo.
03
FirmMW Monitor
Continuous watch on your nodes. A monthly review and an alert when something material changes at the substation you’re building on.
NEXT STEP
Do you have specific sites on the table?
Send a short brief — capacity, earliest energisation date and the sites you’re considering. We’ll reply within two working days with a first read on what we already know about them. If you’d rather read how we compute things first — start with our analyses.
ftCEE Research Brief
Two to four substantive emails a month on power availability, grid connections and costs in Poland. Not a company newsletter.