Forecasting of clean energy market volatility: The role of oil and the technology sector

This study is the first to explore whether the well-known relationship between the clean energy sector, oil prices, and technology stocks can be leveraged to enhance the accuracy of realized volatility forecasts for individual clean energy sub-sectors. Based on intraday data and various decompositions of daily realized volatility, we account for the heterogeneity across clean energy sub-sectors using the dynamic common correlated effect heterogeneous autoregressive (DCCE-HAR) model. Our findings reveal that, in the short term, price variations in technology shares are more informative for future clean energy volatility than fluctuations in oil prices. In an out-of-sample analysis, we individually forecast the volatility of each clean energy sub-index using Lasso, Ridge, and random forest approaches. We identify sub-indices that systematically benefit from technology sector price variation (e.g. Smart Grid, Operators, Energy Management), sub-indices that benefit from oil price variation (e.g. Bio Fuel, Wind and Geothermal), while also sub-indices that show limited sensitivity to price variation in the technology and oil markets.