Mesoscopic Analysis of Market-Based Electricity Price Fluctuation Modes

This paper investigates the fluctuation mode of electricity prices in heterogeneous electricity markets from the mesoscopic perspective of complex networks. First, we convert a sequence of electricity prices into a specific type of complex networks based on the visibility graph algorithm, and then analyze the subgraph and motif characteristics corresponding to that complex network. Based on the motif mining method, we derive the concentration of four-consecutive-node motifs for mesoscopic analysis. Especially, we propose an effective way to observe the fluctuation modes of electricity prices and excavate the dominant fluctuation mode through the motif concentration distribution. Furthermore, we compare the fluctuation modes of electricity prices in typical regions and studied the spatio-temporal change of motif concentration. The results of numerical experiments demonstrate that PJM and Nordic electricity markets, and even regions in the same electricity market, feature heterogeneous mesoscopic patterns, which validates the effectiveness of the proposed method.