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Voltpath classifies each hourly cross-border flow observation into one of four types based on the relationship between power flow direction and the price gradient between the two zones. Understanding these classifications helps you identify market efficiency, physical constraints, and anomalies in European electricity trading.

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The four flow types

Power flows from the higher-price zone to the lower-price zone, reducing the price spread. This is the expected economic behavior : electricity moves toward price equilibrium.
Power would flow toward price equilibrium but the interconnector is at its physical capacity limit (NTC), preventing further equalization. The price spread persists.
Power flows from the lower-price zone to the higher-price zone, opposite to what price signals suggest. This often occurs due to loop flows, scheduled exchanges, or market coupling artifacts.
The border was unavailable due to a planned or unplanned outage of the interconnector during the period.

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Flow type in API responses

The flow_type field in a FlowTypeRow contains one of these four strings for each hourly observation. To see aggregated daily breakdowns, use BorderFlowSummaryRow which returns the percentage of hours in a day that fall into each category: These four percentages sum to approximately 100% for each daily border pair. For a zone-level view of counter-intuitive behavior, the ZoneCiShareRow provides:
Use GET /api/v1/ci-share to monitor which zones experience the most counter-intuitive flows over a given period. This endpoint is useful for identifying persistent market coupling anomalies or zones heavily affected by loop flows.
For a hands-on introduction to fetching this data, see the Quickstart guide or browse the full API Reference.