A Prediction Market Trading Strategy to Hedge Financial Risks of Wind Power Producers in Electricity Markets

Wind power producers participating in day-ahead electricity markets are compelled to pay imbalance costs if they do not generate the same amount of power as they had bid for. These imbalance costs comprise a significant proportion of their income. To reduce the risk of such financial losses, this paper employs the idea of trading in a separate prediction market, as a hedging method. In prediction markets, participants trade shares associated with a certain outcome of an event. We propose that the wind power producers might participate in a prediction market to trade the future value of the wind power and by taking an opposite position in comparison to the electricity market, the imbalance costs will be offset through payouts in the prediction market. Wind power is modelled as a stochastic variable and an optimal trading strategy is developed where the trading volume in the prediction market is analytically derived and formulated by minimising the maximum possible loss and pricing of shares is determined via indifference utility condition. The results suggest that the proposed method limits the loss values and improves the risk measures.