Evaluating Time Series Foundation Models for Electricity Price Forecasting: Contamination Risk, Distributional Shifts, and Covariate Dependence

arXiv:2607.02623v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time series foundation models (TSFMs) have shown strong zero-shot forecasting performance, but their generalization in covariate-driven, non-stationary settings is underexplored. Electricity price forecasting (EPF) presents a challenging testbed due to complex temporal dependencies, distributional shifts, and strong reliance on structural and contextual information. We propose a two-dataset-benchmarking framework for EPF to mitigate contamination risk and enable fair evaluation of TSFMs. We examine key aspects of EPF including point and probabili