Forecasting the Price Distribution of Continuous Intraday Electricity Trading

Abstract

The forecasting literature on intraday electricity markets is scarce and restricted to the analysis of volume-weighted average prices. These only admit a highly aggregated representation of the market. Instead, we propose to forecast the entire volume-weighted price distribution. We approximate this distribution in a non-parametric way using a dense grid of quantiles. We conduct a forecasting study on data from the German intraday market and aim to forecast the quantiles for the last three hours before delivery. We compare the performance of several linear regression models and an ensemble of neural networks to several well designed naive benchmarks. The forecasts only improve marginally over the naive benchmarks for the central quantiles of the distribution which is in line with the latest empirical results in the literature. However, we are able to significantly outperform all benchmarks for the tails of the price distribution.