A nonparametric model for spot price dynamics and pricing of futures contracts in electricity markets

This paper deals with the estimation of continuous time diffusion processes describing the dynamics of electricity spot prices. Different parametric models have been proposed in the literature, each attempting to capture empirical characteristics and stylized facts of the electricity market like the spiky behavior of the spot prices. Although jump-diffusion and regime-switching models perform reasonably well, there is always a trade-off between model parsimony and adequacy. The results in the literature indicate that none of the models seem to consistently outperform its counterparts. This paper avoids making parametric assumption about the drift and the diffusion coefficient functions of the underlying electricity spot prices, and estimates these functions together with the market price of risk in a nonparametric way. The latter allows us to price futures contracts written on electricity spots. Using electricity spot prices and futures data from the regional electricity markets in Australia, we show that besides offering a convenient way of estimating the continuous-time models for electricity spot prices, our nonparametric estimation procedure performs well in- and out-of-sample when dealing with pricing of future contracts.