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Quick Start

This guide walks you through building and running a small two-node energy system model from scratch. It takes about 15 minutes.

What you will build

A simple model with two nodes — City and Wind Farm — connected by a transmission link. The wind farm feeds electricity to the city through a solar PV plant and a battery.

Step 1 — Create a model

  1. Click New Model on the home screen.
  2. Enter a name, e.g. My First Model, and an optional description.
  3. Click Create. The application switches to the model editor.

Step 2 — Add locations

Navigate to the Locations tab in the sidebar.

  1. Click Add Location and fill in:
    • Name: City
    • Latitude: 48.83
    • Longitude: 12.95
  2. Add a second location:
    • Name: Wind Farm
    • Latitude: 49.10
    • Longitude: 12.60
  3. Both nodes appear as markers on the map.

Navigate to the Links tab.

  1. Click Add Link.
  2. Select City as the From node and Wind Farm as the To node.
  3. Set Carrier to electricity.
  4. Leave the loss factor at the default (0.0).
  5. Click Save.

A line appears between the two markers on the map.

Step 4 — Add technologies

Navigate to the Technologies tab.

  1. Click Add Technology → select From template.
  2. Choose solar_pv from the renewable templates and assign it to location City.
  3. Add another: choose battery from the storage templates, assign to City.
  4. Add wind_onshore from renewables, assign to Wind Farm.
  5. Add demand_electricity from demand templates, assign to City. Set the demand parameter to a small value (e.g. 5.0 in your model units).

Step 5 — Set the time horizon

Navigate to Parameters.

  1. Set Start date to 2023-01-01.
  2. Set End date to 2023-01-07 (one week is enough for a quick test).
  3. Set Time resolution to 1H.

Step 6 — Run the model

  1. Click Run in the sidebar.
  2. Click the Start optimization button.
  3. The live log window streams output from the Calliope solver. A typical run for this model takes a few seconds.
  4. When the log shows Model solved successfully, click View Results.

Step 7 — Inspect results

The Results screen shows:

  • Capacity — installed capacity per technology and location.
  • Generation — hourly generation time series in charts.
  • Costs — total system costs.

Next steps