Accurate prediction of electricity prices is crucial for stakeholders in the energy market, particularly for grid operators, energy producers, and consumers. This study focuses on developing a predictive model leveraging Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks to forecast day-ahead electricity prices in the California energy market. The model incorporates a variety of features, including historical price data, weather conditions, and the energy generation mix. A novel custom loss function that integrates Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Jensen-Shannon Divergence (JSD), and a smoothness penalty is introduced to enhance the prediction accuracy and interpretability. Additionally, an online learning approach is implemented to allow the model to adapt to new data incrementally, ensuring continuous relevance and accuracy. The results demonstrate that the custom loss function can improve the model's performance, aligning predicted prices more closely with actual values, particularly during peak intervals. Also, the online learning model outperforms other models by effectively incorporating real-time data, resulting in lower prediction error and variability. The inclusion of the energy generation mix further enhances the model's predictive capabilities, highlighting the importance of comprehensive feature integration. This research provides a robust framework for electricity price forecasting, offering valuable insights and tools for better decision-making in dynamic electricity markets.

In day-ahead electricity market, it is crucial for all market participants to have access to reliable and accurate price forecasts for their decision-making processes. Forecasting methods currently utilized in industrial applications frequently neglect the underlying mechanisms of price formation, while economic research from the perspective of supply and demand have stringent data collection requirements, making it difficult to apply in actual markets. Observing the characteristics of the day-ahead electricity market, we introduce two invariance assumptions to simplify the modeling of supply and demand curves. Upon incorporating the time invariance assumption, we can forecast the supply curve using the market equilibrium points from multiple time slots in the recent period. By introducing the price insensitivity assumption, we can approximate the demand curve using a straight line. The point where these two curves intersect provides us with the forecast price. The proposed model, forecasting suppl\textbf{Y} and demand cUrve simplified by Invariance, termed as YUI, is more efficient than state-of-the-art methods. Our experiment results in Shanxi day-ahead electricity market show that compared with existing methods, YUI can reduce forecast error by 13.8\% in MAE and 28.7\% in sMAPE. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/wangln19/YUI.

Abstract: Trading on electricity markets requires accurate information about the realization of electricity prices and the uncertainty attached to the predictions. We present a probabilistic forecasting approach for day-ahead electricity prices using the fully data-driven deep generative model called normalizing flows. Our modeling approach generates full-day scenarios of day-ahead electricity prices based on conditional features such as residual load forecasts. Furthermore, we propose extended feature sets of prior realizations and a periodic retraining scheme that allows the normalizing flow to adapt to the changing conditions of modern electricity markets. In particular, we investigate the impact of the energy crisis ensuing from the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Our results highlight that the normalizing flow generates high-quality scenarios that reproduce the true price distribution and yield highly accurate forecasts. Additionally, our analysis highlights how our improvements towards adaptations in changing regimes allow the normalizing flow to adapt to changing market conditions and enables continued sampling of high-quality day-ahead price scenarios.

Accurate forecasts of electricity prices are crucial for the management of electric power systems and the development of smart applications. European electricity prices have risen substantially and became highly volatile after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, challenging established forecasting methods. Here, we present a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model for the German-Luxembourg day-ahead electricity prices addressing these challenges. The recurrent structure of the LSTM allows the model to adapt to trends, while the joint prediction of both mean and standard deviation enables a probabilistic prediction. Using a physics-inspired approach - superstatistics - to derive an explanation for the statistics of prices, we show that the LSTM model faithfully reproduces both prices and their volatility.