The fine structure of electricity price volatility

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Kloster, Thomas K., Benth, Fred Espen
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Kloster, Thomas K.
Benth, Fred Espen
author_facet Kloster, Thomas K.
Benth, Fred Espen
contents We conduct the first rigorous study of electricity price volatility for the full panel of electricity prices across three European generation zones. By interpreting the observed day-ahead prices as local averages of a latent price process governed by a stochastic partial differential equation, we develop estimators of the weekly integrated variance. The inherently infinite dimensional setting introduce several complications that are not relevant in the conventional finite dimensional semimartingale setting, and we spend considerable effort in dealing with these. In particular, we must account for both mean-reversion in prices and semigroup-smoothing in the estimated variance. We provide a detailed decomposition and interpretation of the empirical estimates across three vastly different European generation zones, namely Germany, Norway, and Spain. Our findings indicate that each zone has very different drivers of volatility, and that the impact of generation variables differs considerably. We document that leverage effects appear to be present at first sight, but disappear once we condition on suitable state variables, thereby showing that electricity price volatility does not generally exhibit asymmetric responses to price shocks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_13320
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The fine structure of electricity price volatility
Kloster, Thomas K.
Benth, Fred Espen
General Finance
Econometrics
We conduct the first rigorous study of electricity price volatility for the full panel of electricity prices across three European generation zones. By interpreting the observed day-ahead prices as local averages of a latent price process governed by a stochastic partial differential equation, we develop estimators of the weekly integrated variance. The inherently infinite dimensional setting introduce several complications that are not relevant in the conventional finite dimensional semimartingale setting, and we spend considerable effort in dealing with these. In particular, we must account for both mean-reversion in prices and semigroup-smoothing in the estimated variance. We provide a detailed decomposition and interpretation of the empirical estimates across three vastly different European generation zones, namely Germany, Norway, and Spain. Our findings indicate that each zone has very different drivers of volatility, and that the impact of generation variables differs considerably. We document that leverage effects appear to be present at first sight, but disappear once we condition on suitable state variables, thereby showing that electricity price volatility does not generally exhibit asymmetric responses to price shocks.
title The fine structure of electricity price volatility
topic General Finance
Econometrics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.13320