Predicting Electricity Pool Prices Using Hidden Markov Models∗

In this paper, Alberta electricity spot market or Power Pool pricing is studied and the pool price is modeled through a hidden Markov model and multiple local ARX models. By selecting and preprocessing the exogenous factors (e.g. the price forecast from Alberta Electric System Operator (AESO), demand forecast and so forth), a one-hour ahead prediction model for pool price is formulated with parameters being estimated from the real data. Validation results show that this approach can improve the price forecasting and in particular, for high pool prices.