Confusing error message for assets commissioned in-between milestone years

[tsmbland]

E.g. if you add an asset in assets.csv with a commission year of 2025, but the time framework is [2020, 2030], you'll get the error message like

Process GASDRV does not operate in the year 2025

But it's not that GASDRV doesn't operate in this year, the issue is that 2025 is not a milestone year, so this needs to be communicated more clearly

Discussion point: Would it really be a problem if an asset was commissioned between milestone years?

[alexdewar]

True! It's not about when processes operate, so much as the years in which they can be commissioned. How about something verbose:

Process GASDRV is not available for investment in the year 2025, either because it is not between the process's start_yearandend_year or it is not a milestone year.

In terms of your other point: I think it would basically be fine if an asset was commissioned between milestone years (actually, I can imagine this is something users might want to express for a particular model), but the problem is that it's not obvious what process parameters should be used for that year, as we currently only allow process parameters to be set for milestone years or any year < base year. Maybe we should lift that constraint. The only downside is that I can imagine it confusing users if they set process params for a non-milestone year and they're never used, but maybe that's not really a problem.

[tsmbland]

In terms of your other point: I think it would basically be fine if an asset was commissioned between milestone years (actually, I can imagine this is something users might want to express for a particular model), but the problem is that it's not obvious what process parameters should be used for that year, as we currently only allow process parameters to be set for milestone years or any year < base year. Maybe we should lift that constraint. The only downside is that I can imagine it confusing users if they set process params for a non-milestone year and they're never used, but maybe that's not really a problem.

I think we should allow this, and lift the constraint on which years we can provide parameters for. I think if we implement #845 then this becomes a bit easier for users. E.g. instead of giving parameters for [2020, 2025, 2030], they could give parameters for ["..2019", "2020..2024", "2025..2029", "2030"] to make sure all in-between years are covered.

Still a bit annoying, but I think it's better to be explicit about the in-between years rather than, for example, using data from the last milestone year or interpolating.

We could possibly make this even easier by allowing ["..2019", "2020..", "2025..", "2030"], where in this case "2020.." would mean "2020 until the next milestone year" etc.

[alexdewar]

I think we should allow this, and lift the constraint on which years we can provide parameters for. I think if we implement #845 then this becomes a bit easier for users. E.g. instead of giving parameters for [2020, 2025, 2030], they could give parameters for ["..2019", "2020..2024", "2025..2029", "2030"] to make sure all in-between years are covered.

Hmm... what about if we just allow users not to include params for non-milestone years? Then they'll only get an error message if they have an asset which needs a given year.

Still a bit annoying, but I think it's better to be explicit about the in-between years rather than, for example, using data from the last milestone year or interpolating.

We could possibly make this even easier by allowing ["..2019", "2020..", "2025..", "2030"], where in this case "2020.." would mean "2020 until the next milestone year" etc.

Agree that we shouldn't interpolate etc. Too easy to make mistakes.

[tsmbland]

I think we should allow this, and lift the constraint on which years we can provide parameters for. I think if we implement #845 then this becomes a bit easier for users. E.g. instead of giving parameters for [2020, 2025, 2030], they could give parameters for ["..2019", "2020..2024", "2025..2029", "2030"] to make sure all in-between years are covered.

Hmm... what about if we just allow users not to include params for non-milestone years? Then they'll only get an error message if they have an asset which needs a given year.

Yeah, I wasn't suggesting we mandate that all years are covered, but I think most users would rather do this anyway rather than having to go through all the existing assets and selectively add parameters for each of their commission years, especially if we went with the suggestion below where you just have to add a couple of dots to each row

Still a bit annoying, but I think it's better to be explicit about the in-between years rather than, for example, using data from the last milestone year or interpolating.
We could possibly make this even easier by allowing ["..2019", "2020..", "2025..", "2030"], where in this case "2020.." would mean "2020 until the next milestone year" etc.

Agree that we shouldn't interpolate etc. Too easy to make mistakes.

[alexdewar]

Assigning myself as this should go away with #859