Quarter-hour products are 15-minute electricity delivery contracts on the European intraday market, and since October 2025 each day is split into 96 of them across the coupled European intraday markets. They exist because generation and demand, especially from batteries and renewables, vary meaningfully within a single hour, so a finer delivery granularity lets desks trade closer to the real shape of the grid. Quarter-hour contracts trade continuously alongside hourly and half-hourly products on the same order book, right up to delivery, and cross-border matching applies to each 15-minute window individually. For a trading system, more products per day means more contracts open at once and more order-book activity to process, which is why the shift to quarter-hours has raised the throughput and latency bar on any infrastructure sitting between a desk and the exchange.
Why do quarter-hour products exist?
Because an hourly contract averages away the shape of the hour. Solar ramps up and down inside a single delivery hour, demand steps rather than glides, and a battery can charge and discharge more than once within sixty minutes, none of which an hourly product can express. A 15-minute delivery window lets the market price each part of the hour on its own, so the steep quarter of a solar ramp trades at a different price than the flat one. The finer the granularity, the closer traded positions can follow what the grid physically does.
How do quarter-hour products trade?
Exactly like any other intraday contract: continuously, on the same order book, through the same session and order types, right up to delivery. On EPEX SPOT they trade on the M7 trading system, whose contract granularity runs hourly, half-hourly, and quarter-hourly; the quarter-hours are additional products, not a replacement for the coarser ones. Financially a quarter-hour contract is simply a shorter slice of energy: energy is price × MW × hours, so a quarter-hour position counts a quarter of the hourly value at the same price and size. Cross-border, each 15-minute window carries its own transfer capacity, which expires with the interval.
What do quarter-hour products mean for batteries?
Batteries are the asset class quarter-hours were made for. A battery earns on the shape of prices, charging in the cheap quarters and discharging into the expensive ones, and much of that shape lives inside the hour, where hourly products cannot reach it. Strategies like rolling intrinsic re-optimise a battery's position continuously as prices move, buying and selling the same delivery windows repeatedly on the way to delivery. That makes the battery's revenue a function of market tempo: the faster and more reliably its systems read the book and act on it, the more of the intra-hour spread it captures, and trading on a stale book is measurable lost capture.
What do 96 daily products mean for trading systems?
More open contracts at any moment, and much more order-book activity to keep up with. Every delivery area multiplies its product count, every open contract has its own book, and the market updates all of them continuously; the Netherlands alone produces nearly 10 million order-book updates a day. A system that consumes the intraday feed has to apply that stream fast enough that the book its traders and algorithms read is actually current; Voltnir processes those updates in about 15 microseconds each. This is the infrastructure consequence of finer granularity: quarter-hours did not just add products, they raised the bar for what counts as a live view of the market. How the order book is maintained is covered in the market-data section of the features page.
How does Voltnir handle quarter-hour products?
As first-class contracts, configured rather than hard-coded: a desk lists the delivery areas its EPEX SPOT membership is admitted to and the M7 products it wants, hourly through quarter-hourly, and Voltnir maintains the order book, validates orders, and tracks position, cash, and P&L for exactly that set. Quarter-hour positions are valued correctly in the risk model (a quarter of the hourly value for the same price and size), the full order-type set including block and balance orders applies, and the same live book is served over REST, WebSocket, and gRPC. The complete picture is on the features page, or you can run it against EPEX SPOT SIM.
Frequently asked questions
How many quarter-hour products trade each day?
Since October 2025, 96: one for each 15-minute delivery window of the day, across the coupled European intraday markets, trading alongside the hourly and half-hourly products on the same continuous order book.
Can I still trade hourly products?
Yes. Quarter-hour products trade alongside hourly and half-hourly contracts on the same continuous intraday market. Finer granularity adds products, it does not replace the coarser ones. Contract granularity follows the M7 trading system.
Do quarter-hour products trade cross-border?
Yes. Cross-border matching applies per delivery interval: each 15-minute window has its own available transfer capacity on each border, and that capacity expires with the interval.
Why do quarter-hour products matter for batteries?
Because a battery earns on the shape of prices within the hour. Fifteen-minute contracts let a battery charge and discharge against intra-hour ramps that an hourly product averages away, and strategies like rolling intrinsic re-optimise that position continuously as the market moves.