Modeling Electricity Price Using A Threshold Conditional Autoregressive Geometric Process Jump Model

Electricity market prices are highly volatile and often have high spikes. Both government authorities and market participants require sophisticated models and techniques for forecasting future prices and managing relevant financial risks in such a volatile market. This article extends the conditional autoregressive geometric process (CARGP) model (Chan et al., 2012) to the CARGP model with thresholds and jumps, which is abbreviated as CARGP-TJ model in this article. We will demonstrate that the proposed CARGP-TJ model not only captures the unique features of the electricity price but also performs better than other existing models. For robustness consideration, a heavy-tailed error distribution is adopted. Model implementation relies on the powerful Bayesian Markov chain Monte Carlo simulation techniques via WinBUGS software. The analysis of the daily maximum electricity prices of the New South Wales, Australia reveals that the proposed CARGP-TJ model captures the price spikes well for both in-sample estimation and out-of-sample forecast.