An Ambit Field Framework for the Full Panel of Day-ahead Electricity Prices

Abstract: This paper considers the often overlooked fact that electricity spot prices in individual European generation zones evolve as a high dimensional panel structure. A general continuous time framework is developed by formulating the panel as an ambit field indexed by a cylinder surface, where the cross sectional dimension is represented by a circle. This requires a treatment of ambit fields on manifolds, but the departure from Euclidean space allows for embedding intrinsic dependence structures into the index set in a flexible and parameter-free way, where the daily delivery periods have a canonical mapping onto the circle. The model is a natural space-time extension of volatility modulated L\'evy-driven Volterra processes, which have previously been studied in the context of energy markets, and the pricing of electricity derivatives turns out to be essentially as analytically tractable as in the null-spatial setting. The space-time framework extends the scope of possible derivatives to products written on individual delivery periods, where spreads between these constitute an interesting example. We establish useful formulas for the pricing of various derivatives along with a simulation scheme, and study specifications of the dependence structure in detail.