Abstract:In the electricity market environment, electricity price forecasting plays an essential role in the decision-making process of a power generation company, especially in developing the optimal bidding strategy for maximizing revenues. Hence, it is necessary for a power generation company to develop an accurate electricity price forecasting algorithm. Given this background, this paper proposes a two-step day-ahead electricity price forecasting algorithm based on the weighted K-nearest neighborhood (WKNN) method and the Gaussian process regression (GPR) approach. In the first step, several predictors, i.e., operation indicators, are presented and the WKNN method is employed to detect the day-ahead price spike based on these indicators. In the second step, the outputs of the first step are regarded as a new predictor, and it is utilized together with the operation indicators to accurately forecast the electricity price based on the GPR approach. The proposed algorithm is verified by actual market data in Pennsylvania-New Jersey-Maryland Interconnection (PJM), and comparisons between this algorithm and existing ones are also made to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can attain accurate price forecasting results even with several price spikes in historical electricity price data.