Modelling of Fuel- and Energy-Switching Prices by Mean-Reverting Processes and Their Applications to Alberta Energy Markets

Abstract

This paper introduces a fuel-switching price to the Alberta market, which is designed for encouraging power plant companies to switch from coal to natural gas when they produce electricity; this has been successfully applied to the European market. Moreover, we consider an energy-switching price which considers power switch from natural gas to wind. We modeled these two prices using five mean reverting processes including a Regime-switching processes, Lévy-driven Ornstein–Uhlenbeck process and Inhomogeneous Geometric Brownian Motion, and estimate them based on multiple procedures such as Maximum likelihood estimation and Expectation-Maximization algorithm. Finally, this paper proves previous results applied to the Albertan Market where the jump modeling technique is needed when modeling fuel-switching data. In addition, it not only gives promising conclusions on the necessity of introducing Regime-switching models to the fuel-switching data, but also shows that the Regime-switching model is better fitted to the data.

Keywords

• alberta energy markets
• mean-reverting stochastic processes
• carbon pricing
• renewable energies
• fuel-switching
• levy process