Electricity Forward Agreement (calendar) (short: EFA system) is a calendar used to specify load profiles when trading on the

electricity market In a broad sense, an electricity market is a system that facilitates the exchange of electricity-related goods and services. During more than a century of evolution of the electric power industry, the economics of the electricity markets had u ...

. It was officially only valid until October 2014, but is still abundantly used among

commodity In economics, a commodity is an economic good, usually a resource, that has full or substantial fungibility: that is, the market treats instances of the good as equivalent or nearly so with no regard to who produced them. The price of a co ...

traders.

Features of the EFA calendar

One distinguishes between weekdays ''WD'' and weekend ''WE'' since the electricity consumption is clearly lower on Saturdays and Sundays. An ''EFA day'' starts on 11pm local time and runs through to 11pm the next (astronomical) day. An EFA-week ''WK'' consists of five ''WD'' and two ''WE''-days. An ''EFA month'' is defined differently to common months: March, June, September and December have five weeks, all other months are considered to have exactly four weeks. The two ''EFA seasons'' are winter (WK 40 – WK 13) and summer (WK 14 – WK 39), each having exactly 26 weeks. Due to the existence of

leap year A leap year (also known as an intercalary year or bissextile year) is a calendar year that contains an additional day (or, in the case of a lunisolar calendar, a month) added to keep the calendar year synchronized with the astronomical year o ...

s, some EFA-Decembers have six weeks (e.g. 2004 and 2009), a strong difference from the commonly used Gregorian calendar system where February is the leap month. The EFA day is composed of six blocks of 4 hours each. For each block baseload products exist (i.e. WD 1/2/3/4/5/6 and WE 1/2/3/4/5/6).

Peak load In electrical engineering, a load profile is a graph of the variation in the electrical load versus time. A load profile will vary according to customer type (typical examples include residential, commercial and industrial), temperature and hol ...

products only exist for ''WD3'', ''WD4'' and ''WD5'' (also on

bank holiday A bank holiday is a national public holiday in the United Kingdom, Republic of Ireland and the Crown Dependencies. The term refers to all public holidays in the United Kingdom, be they set out in statute, declared by royal proclamation or he ...

s), and consequently off-peak products are only available for the remaining EFA blocks of each week. Blocks 1 and 2 are usually termed ''overnight blocks'', the other blocks are ''day blocks''.

References

{{Electricity generation Electric power distribution Electricity markets