TRACE: A Reproducible Benchmark for Electricity Price Forecasting with Official Operational Text

arXiv:2610.02256v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Electricity price forecasting (EPF) supports scheduling, bidding, and risk management in electricity markets, yet existing benchmarks focus mainly on numerical inputs, leaving the forecasting value of forecast-time textual context insufficiently evaluated. We introduce TRACE, a reproducible benchmark of 7,300 zone--day instances pairing prices from five zones in a major U.S. market with official operational text available at the forecast cutoff. TRACE reconstructs official operational text at each cutoff, preventing post-cutoff information leakage. We evaluate TRACE for semantic alignment and forecasting value. Semantic assessments align with central movement and both tail risks in ground-truth prices, most consistently for upper-tail price risk. Forecasting value is reflected in a median 7.4\% reduction in upper-tail pinball loss across time-series foundation models. A controlled cross-day text-mismatch ablation reverses the gains, falling below the no-text baseline.