@pipeworx/iso-ne

ISO New England market data via ISO Express web services — five-minute LMPs, system load and generation fuel mix for the six New England states (CT, MA, ME, NH, RI, VT).

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1683+ live data sources.

Tools

• isone_lmp(location_id?, date?, limit?) — five-minute real-time LMP with energy, congestion and loss components. Omit date for the current interval.
• isone_load(date?, limit?) — five-minute total system load in MW.
• isone_fuel_mix(date?, limit?) — generation by fuel category (gas, nuclear, hydro, wind, solar, refuse, wood, coal, oil, landfill gas, imports) with the marginal-fuel flag.

Auth

BYO only today. HTTP Basic against webservices.iso-ne.com. Platform fallback env var — not provisioned: PLATFORM_ISONE_KEY.

Registration is free at https://www.iso-ne.com/participate/applications-status-changes/ (an "ISO Express / Web Services" account), but ISO-NE approves the account before the credentials work. A brand-new registration is refused exactly like a wrong password, so the pack's 401 message names the approval step rather than implying the password is wrong.

_apiKey accepts either spelling:

• "username:password" — plain; the pack base64-encodes it.
• base64("username:password") — pre-encoded, same convention as seo-serp.

Anything else fails locally with a clear message instead of becoming a bare upstream 401 that looks like an outage.

One env var, not PLATFORM_ISONE_USER + PLATFORM_ISONE_PASS: the gateway injects exactly one secret per pack, into _apiKey. So the stored credential is the single string the Basic scheme actually needs. The pack is marked byoExpected: true in workers/gateway/src/pack-manifest.json so the vendor-key ratchet does not fail the deploy; drop it the day the credential lands.

Data sources

• https://webservices.iso-ne.com/api/v1.1/ — the authenticated API. /fiveminutelmp/current, /fiveminutesystemload/current, /genfuelmix/current, and /…/day/YYYYMMDD for a historical day.
• https://www.iso-ne.com/isoexpress/ — the public browser UI over the same data.

Traps

• There is no keyless fallback. This was checked, not assumed. Probed 2026-09-17, all refused:
  • webservices.iso-ne.com/api/v1.1/fiveminutesystemload/current → 401
  • www.iso-ne.com/ws/wsclient → 500 (for every parameter shape tried)
  • www.iso-ne.com/transform/csv/genfuelmix?start=… → 403, and it stays 403 with a browser User-Agent and an isoexpress Referer. Note it is a 403 and not a 404, so the path exists — it is session-gated, not merely UA-gated (cf. reference_gov_site_ua_blocks, where a UA swap is usually the fix).
• Response shapes here are UNVERIFIED. Holding no account, no ISO-NE response body in this pack has been observed live. ISO-NE wraps results in a singular/plural pair — {"FiveMinLmps": {"FiveMinLmp": [...]}} — and the pack unwraps that generically (descend to the first array-valued property) and returns rows as published, without remapping field names. The envelope field in every response reports which keys it actually walked, so the first real call with a credential tells you the true shape rather than hiding it. Tighten once credentials exist.
• Same-day requests can legitimately be empty. ISO-NE publishes each day's reports after the fact. The pack treats a 0-row success as an error and says to try the previous day, rather than returning an empty array as a clean answer.
• ISO-NE does not use a .json suffix consistently across its docs; this pack appends .json to every path, which is the form the v1.1 API accepts.

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "iso-ne": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/iso-ne/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/iso-ne/mcp returns the tools in the table above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — ask_pipeworx, discover_tools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and is the authoritative answer for a given day.

This is deliberate, not multiplexing by accident. The meta-tools are what let a scoped connection answer a question this pack does not cover — via ask_pipeworx, which routes across the whole catalog — without you adding a second MCP server. There is currently no way to mount a pack endpoint without them; if the extra schemas cost you more context than the routing is worth, connect to the full gateway once rather than to several pack endpoints.

Or connect to the full Pipeworx gateway to get every pack's tools listed directly, instead of just this one's:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pipeworx": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Both URLs reach the same gateway and the same 1683+ data sources. The only difference is which pack's tools are listed directly; ask_pipeworx reaches all of them from either one.

No MCP client? Call it over HTTP

curl -X POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/isone_lmp \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"limit":100}'

No account needed for the first calls. Inspect any tool: GET https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/isone_lmp. Find one: POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_packs with {"query":"..."}.

Standalone (no gateway account)

This package also runs as a local stdio MCP server — no Pipeworx account, no gateway round-trip:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "iso-ne": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@pipeworx/mcp-iso-ne"]
    }
  }
}

Or run it directly to confirm it starts:

npx -y @pipeworx/mcp-iso-ne

It speaks MCP over stdin/stdout and answers initialize/tools/list/tools/call for only this pack's tools — none of the shared meta-tools the gateway connection above adds. Same source, same tools, no ask_pipeworx routing.

Using with ask_pipeworx

Instead of calling tools directly, you can ask questions in plain English — this works on the pack endpoint above as well as on the full gateway:

ask_pipeworx({ question: "your question about Iso Ne data" })

The gateway picks the right tool and fills the arguments automatically.

More

• Docs and guides
• pipeworx.io

License

MIT