Alberta's electricity futures market: An empirical analysis of price formation

IF 13.6 2区经济学 Q1 ECONOMICS

Energy Economics Pub Date : 2025-02-07 DOI:10.1016/j.eneco.2025.108284

Derek E.H. Olmstead , Adonis Yatchew

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Abstract

Alberta operates an energy-only electricity market, which allows the unilateral exercise of market power to create investment incentives and resolve the ‘missing money’ problem. This stands in contrast to other jurisdictions that have implemented administratively complex capacity markets to ensure adequate supply. A key feature of Alberta's market is its futures market, where contracts that settle against realized spot prices are exchanged. The futures market enables market participants to hedge against price volatility. It informs investment decision, enhances price transparency and aids in competitive price formation by diminishing the incentive to exercise market power in the spot market. Our empirical work explores Alberta's electricity futures market in two main areas: the relationship between futures and realized spot prices, and the evolution of futures prices influenced by expected spot market conditions. We find that (i) electricity futures prices do not provide an unbiased forecast of spot prices, (ii) a portion of the realized futures premium can be explained by information that is obtained after the futures price has been set, and (iii) futures prices appear to efficiently reflect changes in available information.

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来源期刊

Energy Economics ECONOMICS-

CiteScore

18.60

自引率

12.50%

发文量

524

期刊介绍： Energy Economics is a field journal that focuses on energy economics and energy finance. It covers various themes including the exploitation, conversion, and use of energy, markets for energy commodities and derivatives, regulation and taxation, forecasting, environment and climate, international trade, development, and monetary policy. The journal welcomes contributions that utilize diverse methods such as experiments, surveys, econometrics, decomposition, simulation models, equilibrium models, optimization models, and analytical models. It publishes a combination of papers employing different methods to explore a wide range of topics. The journal's replication policy encourages the submission of replication studies, wherein researchers reproduce and extend the key results of original studies while explaining any differences. Energy Economics is indexed and abstracted in several databases including Environmental Abstracts, Fuel and Energy Abstracts, Social Sciences Citation Index, GEOBASE, Social & Behavioral Sciences, Journal of Economic Literature, INSPEC, and more.