Modeling the daily electricity price volatility with realized measures

- We model and forecast daily electricity price volatility on the European Power Exchange.
- We apply a realized GARCH model based on two realized volatility measures.
- The range-based volatility estimator performs best, in-sample, but also out-of-sample.
- The out-of-sample forecast quality is improved over the benchmark model under eight conventional criteria.

We propose using Realized GARCH-type models to estimate the daily price volatility in the EPEX power markets. The model specifications extract the volatility-related information from realized measures, which improves the in-sample fit of the data. More importantly, evidence on the out-of-sample predictability reinforces the value of the specifications, as the forecast quality is improved over the benchmark EGARCH model under eight conventional criteria. In particular, we show that the benefit of including intraday range as a realized measure is more substantial than realized variance. All the key findings are robust under rolling-window and recursive estimation schemes, Gaussian and skewed t-distribution assumptions on the innovation process, and alternative specifications on the predictable price component.