Forecasting long term electricity prices

Abstract

Over the last few years the worldwide electricity industry organization has been embedded in a very important restructuring process aiming for deregulation and competition. In this new context the risk and uncertainty of generators has considerably grown. In particular, price volatility is the main source of uncertainty. Therefore, electricity generation companies need to forecast electricity prices as accurately as possible in order to estimate not only short term market behavior, but also to make budgets and investments in the medium and log term. This paper proposes a method devoted to estimate the probability distribution of the electricity spot price. The mean expected price is obtained by means of an electricity market equilibrium model. Using this mean price as explanatory variable, a Beta distribution is adjusted.