The Valuation of Long-Term Exchange Options in the German Electricity Market

Abstract

This paper analyzes the valuation of monthly Physical Transmission Rights (PTRs) on the German-Dutch interconnector. From a financial perspective, PTRs are exchange options written on the German and Dutch day-ahead electricity price. We extend the famous exchange option model by Margrabe (1978) and include jumps in the underlying prices. We develop a quasi closed-form solution for our exchange option model and compare its pricing performance to the basic model without jumps for all monthly PTRs between 2001 and 2008. Our results show that the inclusion of jumps significantly reduces the Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) between model and market prices. We further show that the inclusion of de-spiked prices into both models also improves their pricing performance. Overall, the empirical results show that monthly PTR options are clearly undervalued compared to model prices and even strictly cheaper than the corresponding futures contracts.

Keywords: Electricity, Physical Transmission Right, Margrabe, MCMC

JEL Classification: C13, G13, Q40