Prediction Markets for Probabilistic Forecasting of Renewable Energy Sources

This paper demonstrates how a binary prediction market is capable of achieving a probabilistic renewable energy forecast. In prediction markets, participants trade shares associated with the outcome of unknown future events (here, the renewable production, as a random variable), and the instantaneous price of shares represents the probability of the outcome. The focus of this study is to exploit this informational value of the prediction market price in renewable energy forecasting. To this end, in this paper three different methods of renewable probabilistic forecasting have been considered as the trading agents in a binary prediction market, the aggregated probability of the renewable output is elicited from the equilibrium price in this market and finally, the full cumulative distribution function of possible renewable output is extracted through regression analysis. The proposed method is applied to the test cases of three onshore wind farms in Australia. The simulation results suggest that the performance of the proposed method is superior to the individual models and forecasting is improved in terms of reduction in the electricity market imbalance costs.