Time-Adaptive Probabilistic Forecasts of Electricity Spot Prices with Application to Risk Management.

The increasing exposure to renewable energy has amplified the need for risk management in electricity markets. Electricity price risk poses a major challenge to market participants. We propose an approach to model and forecast electricity prices taking into account information on renewable energy production. While most literature focuses on point forecasting, our methodology forecasts the whole distribution of electricity prices and incorporates spike risk, which is of great value for risk management. It is based on functional principal component analysis and time-adaptive nonparametric density estimation techniques. The methodology is applied to electricity market data from Germany. We find that renewable infeed effects both, the location and the shape of spot price densities. A comparison with benchmark methods and an application to risk management are provided