Product Description

Praise for Energy and Power Risk Management

"Energy and Power Risk Management identifies and addresses the key issues in the development of the turbulent energy industry and the challenges it poses to market players. An insightful and far-reaching book written by two renowned professionals."
–Helyette Géman, Professor of Finance
University Paris Dauphine and ESSEC

"The most up-to-date and comprehensive book on managing energy price risk in the natural gas and power markets. An absolute imperative for energy traders and energy risk management professionals."
–Vincent Kaminski, Managing Director
Citadel Investment Group LLC

"Eydeland and Wolyniec’s work does an excellent job of outlining the methods needed to measure and manage risk in the volatile energy market."
–Gerald G. Fleming, Vice President, Head of East Power Trading, TXU Energy Trading

"This book combines academic rigor with real-world practicality. It is a must-read for anyone in energy risk management or asset valuation."
–Ron Erd, Senior Vice President
American Electric Power

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #260470 in Books
• Published on: 2002-12-20
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 504 pages

Review
"If you were considering buying one book on this topic this would be a strong candidate." -- The Journal of Energy Literature, June 2003

From the Inside Flap
If you’ve participated in the energy and power markets on any level, you’ve probably spent a considerable amount of time searching for the best ways to manage the risks associated with these unstable and sometimes erratic markets. In Energy and Power Risk Management, experts Alexander Eydeland and Krzysztof Wolyniec unveil the latest developments in modeling, pricing, and hedging within the energy and power markets, so you can begin to successfully assess and manage the risks of the complex derivative structures that are part of your portfolio.

If you’re involved with energy and power assets and derivatives, you need a firm understanding of techniques specific to energy and power markets–and this book delivers. Energy and Power Risk Management opens with a brief introduction to the energy market, describing everything from oil and gas to electricity and emissions. You’ll receive a detailed primer on the most frequently encountered products in these markets–including a variety of energy-related spreads, electricity futures, and natural gas options–and learn how to effectively implement them on a regular basis. You’ll also learn how to interpret the special properties of data used in energy models and how to gain a better understanding of the information that drives them.

After laying down a solid foundation, Energy and Power Risk Management moves on to explore the pricing and hedging models appropriate for these markets. Topics include:

• Reduced-form price models, including mean-reverting and jump-diffusion processes
• Forward price processes–with an introduction to models describing the forward curve evolution, such as HJM, BGM, and string models
• The use and misuse of correlations
• A hybrid model for power prices

This unique resource also provides you with a valuable overview of the valuation and hedging of power, natural gas and oil derivatives and assets (swing options, storage, transportation, transmission, demand-management deals), as well as cross-commodity products (power plants, weather-contingent structures). It also offers a systematic analysis of general issues of risk-adjustment, risk-measurement, and hedging.

Even with all the current information available, it is still difficult to find a detailed analysis of practical issues regarding modeling, pricing, and hedging of energy derivatives. With Energy and Power Risk Management as your guide, you can manage the inherent risks of these markets while optimizing your performance in them.

From the Back Cover
Praise for Energy and Power Risk Management

"Energy and Power Risk Management identifies and addresses the key issues in the development of the turbulent energy industry and the challenges it poses to market players. An insightful and far-reaching book written by two renowned professionals."
–Helyette Géman, Professor of Finance
University Paris Dauphine and ESSEC

"The most up-to-date and comprehensive book on managing energy price risk in the natural gas and power markets. An absolute imperative for energy traders and energy risk management professionals."
–Vincent Kaminski, Managing Director
Citadel Investment Group LLC

"Eydeland and Wolyniec’s work does an excellent job of outlining the methods needed to measure and manage risk in the volatile energy market."
–Gerald G. Fleming, Vice President, Head of East Power Trading, TXU Energy Trading

"This book combines academic rigor with real-world practicality. It is a must-read for anyone in energy risk management or asset valuation."
–Ron Erd, Senior Vice President
American Electric Power

Customer Reviews

Not for the average industry professional
The authors have written a very detailed, well structured text on the different models and developments in the power and fuel markets. It's a very complex, mathematical analysis of the different techniques being used, and the text may lose a number of readers in the overly rigorous formulations. For those involved in risk management, market modeling, or asset management, the book would be a good secondary or tertiary read after you've established a sound understanding of stochastic models and current hedging and pricing techniques in the marketplace. For the layman in the industry, the book will be far too heavy and not worth the read.

Good overview
The management of risk in the context of energy or weather is quite different than in other contexts, due to the peculiarities of the data that occurs in energy prices. The high volatility of energy prices can range, as the authors of this book point out, between 50-100% for gas, to 100-500% for electricity. No doubt this kind of volatility, and other properties such as correlations and mean reversion, entails that some different mathematical strategies for modeling energy derivatives be devised. The authors give a good tour of some of these strategies, and anyone interested in energy derivatives will gain a lot of insight into their modeling when reading this book. Due to space constraints, only chapters 5 and 7, which this reviewer considered the most important of the book, will be reviewed here.

In chapter 5 the author presents techniques for energy modeling that go beyond the used of the convenience yield by using forward pricing techniques. The goal is to describe the dynamics of future contract prices that takes into account the correlations with other futures, and not on the price evolution of a single contract. Thus it is the `forward curve' that is relevant for obtaining a useable model for derivative cash flow. The HJM model is presented as one of these, with changes in the forward curve over a particular time interval represented as a linear combination of random perturbations. For energy markets, each perturbation is specified by a deterministic shape function multiplied by a Gaussian factor. The unobservability of the factors determining the forward curve evolution makes the use of historical data mandatory if the parameters are to be estimated. But lack of sufficient historical data and its nonstationarity complicate this estimation. The authors discuss the Schwartz-Smith multi-factor model as an example of a forward curve dynamics model and give some solutions. They then move on to a model that specifies the dynamics for only the contracts that are actually traded, which in the literature are called `market models.' The model they actually discuss is a multivariate geometric Brownian motion representation of the forward curve dynamics, where the volatility and drift functions are linear functions of the forward prices. The authors then derive the `discrete string models', where it is assumed that the number of factors is equal to the number of contracts, and the random factors are governed by ordinary Brownian motion. String models are represented as having the advantage of being able to directly observe the factors in the historical data. The authors apply string models to multi-commodity cases, and discuss an example for monthly forward prices. They show how to match the current forward curve, the option prices, and the correlation structure for this model.

The discussion in chapter 7 revolves around finding better models for the dynamics of power prices that capture the special properties of energy prices, such as mean reversion and seasonality, and the need for stable models. They therefore introduce `hybrid models', which they claim give a more natural representation of the dynamics of power prices, make use of nonprice forward-looking information, and can take the historical data on power prices and then extend it to information on fuel prices, outages, etc. The construction of these models is based on the use of nonlinear transformations on a collection of random variables. The random variables are essentially the system demand, natural gas and oil price, outages, emission prices, and weather at a particular time. The power price then can be written as a function of the dynamics of these factors, the latter written by the authors in terms of the corresponding tradables. Recognizing that hedging cannot be done on some of these factors, they adjust the power price formula so that the power tradables, i.e. the forwards and option prices, are exactly matched. This matching transformation is chosen so that if the forward contracts and options are priced using the adjusted formula, one recovers the exact current prices. The model, as the authors summarize it, is an attempt to explain the behavior of the tradables in terms of the evolution of the underlying factors and static adjustments to the terminal probability distribution. Historical information on the tradables and spot products is not used to calibrate the model, but it is used to validate the model. The authors distinguish between `reduced-form' hybrid models, where the transformation is calibrated from the historical prices, and `fundamental' hybrid models, where the transformation is calibrated from the market structure and is only tested on the historical prices. The authors discuss an example of a reduced-form hybrid model that is heavily parametrized, but has the advantage of using price data more efficiently. The rest of the chapter concentrates on fundamental hybrid models, with the author first discussing how power prices are formed in competitive markets. They consider a typical pool market, with the price determined via auction mechanisms. The authors then try to identify and characterize the underlying random variables that actually affect power prices. The time series for the price of power is written in terms of the demand using a `bid stack' function. The bid stack function is approximated by a `generation stack' that is found for a given time by sorting generation units by their generation costs. This approximation is checked by comparing the marginal generation costs generated by the generation stack with the distribution of power prices determined by the time series via the bid stack. There should be agreement in both approaches between the higher order moments. This comparison forms the basis of the authors' hybrid approach to modeling power prices. A transformation is found which relates the marginal generation costs to the distribution of power prices with the requirement that the prices of market instruments used for calibration are matched, and the higher moments are (approximately) preserved. The transformation is not unique, and in fact a family of transformations induced by the multiplication and stack scaling operators can be found.

Excellent subject treatment
Until now there were a handful of papers, precious few books, and mostly inside proprietary models and experience that dealt with the complex subject of power trading and all its flavors. This book provides a nice summary of many of the present issues. The treatment of the subject is somewhat mathematically rigorous, so the book might not be for traders as much as it is for quants or risk managers.

To me, the greatest strength of the book lies in its fairly detailed analysis of what DOESN'T work, i.e. why common models and methods from the financial and other commodity realms can not be successfully grafted onto the energy market without risking significant valuation and cash flow prediction errors. The hybrid model they formulate towards the end of the book is very similar to Skantze and Ilic (2001). The departure from most previous models is that they attempt to use the markets to formulate and calibrate the structure instead of relying too much on past historical price/load data, which without some empirical understanding of the underlying processes, is fraught with danger due to rapidly evolving nature of the power market (or at least once rapidly evolving--it seems to be a little static at the moment).

Some familiarity with the market and stochastic/statistical mathematics is assumed. References to specific topics and more in depth analysis of particular subjects are good. The authors have a grip on real-world trading, risk, and cashflow issues, which makes this a useful reference for just about anyone associated with those aspects of the power market. I recommend it.