Creating a Scenario

In Scenario Builder, your work is organised into projects and scenarios:

• A project is a container for related scenarios, for example all the scenarios exploring one research question or country
• A scenario explores a single possible future for the electricity system, based on your assumptions about demand, technology, and policy

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1. Create a project

From your workspace, click New Project, give it a name, and create it. You can rename or delete a project later from the project page.

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2. Create a scenario

Open your project and click New Scenario. The form has a few core fields plus a Configuration section that sets the shape of your model.

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Name and research question

• Name: a unique name for the scenario (e.g. Growth economy)
• Research question (optional): a short description of what the scenario explores (e.g. A high-growth economy with increased energy demand). This is also a useful starting point for AMP.

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Geographies and spatial resolution

Choose the geographies your scenario covers, then a spatial resolution that controls how finely those geographies are divided into nodes: The available resolutions and node counts differ by country. See the Country models section for what each model offers. For more on how spatial detail affects results, see Model resolution.

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Model type

Choose the framework that fits your question: See Model frameworks for a fuller comparison and guidance on choosing, and on soft-linking a capacity expansion plan into a dispatch model.

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Timeline

Set the years your scenario covers:

• Capacity Expansion runs over a range: pick a Start and End year
• Dispatch models a single year only

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Temporal resolution

Temporal resolution sets how many time slices the model uses to represent variation within a year. Each scenario’s time slices are the product of parts of a year × parts of a day: Higher resolution captures more demand and renewable variability but takes longer to solve. See Model resolution for the trade-offs.

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3. What happens next

Every scenario starts from a calibrated base model with sensible default inputs, so you can run it immediately to get a least-cost baseline. From there you can: