Empirical evaluation of Time Series Foundation Models for Day-ahead and Imbalance Electricity Price Forecasting in Belgium

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.17045v1
• Date: Sat, 16 May 2026 15:30:23 GMT
• Title: Empirical evaluation of Time Series Foundation Models for Day-ahead and Imbalance Electricity Price Forecasting in Belgium
• Abstract summary: Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) promise zero-shot forecasting capabilities with minimal task-specific training.<n>This study provides a systematic empirical evaluation of several TSFMs for forecasting Belgian day-ahead and imbalance electricity prices.<n>We find that TSFMs exhibit genuine zero-shot forecasting skills but still struggle under extreme market conditions.
• Score: 0.0
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
• Abstract: Recent advances in Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) promise zero-shot forecasting capabilities with minimal task-specific training. While these models have shown strong performance across generic benchmarks, their applicability in volatile, complex electricity markets remains underexplored. Addressing this gap, this study provides a systematic empirical evaluation of several TSFMs, specifically Chronos-2 and Chronos-Bolt (developed by Amazon), and TimesFM 2.5 (provided by Google), for forecasting Belgian day-ahead and imbalance electricity prices. For both considered markets, Chronos-2 in ARX mode produces the most accurate forecasts. Compared with the best ensemble prediction from other machine learning methods, Chronos-2's Mean Absolute Error (MAE) is 5% lower for the day-ahead market. In contrast, the model yields 10% higher MAE predicting imbalance prices across all forecast horizons, except for the two-hour-ahead horizon. Moreover, we find that TSFMs exhibit genuine zero-shot forecasting skills but still struggle under extreme market conditions.

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