Cambium Documentation: Version 2021

Cambium is a tool that assembles structured data sets of simulated hourly emission, cost, and operational data for modeled futures of the U.S. electric sector with metrics designed to be useful for long-term decision-making. It was built to expand the metrics reported in the National Renewable Energy Laboratory's (NREL's) Standard Scenarios - an annually released set of projections of how the U.S. electric sector could evolve across a suite of different potential futures, looking forward through 2050 (Cole et al. 2021) Information about Cambium and related publications can be found at https://nrel.gov/analysis/cambium.html, and the Cambium data sets for the Standard Scenarios can be viewed and downloaded at https://cambium.nrel.gov/. In this documentation, we define the metrics reported in Cambium databases (Section 4) and document the Cambium-specific methods for calculating those metrics (Section 5). As this document is intended to cover multiple Cambium data releases, we do not document specific scenarios here - for individual data releases, readers should look for an accompanying report that describes the assumptions and data that underlie that specific release. For Cambium databases that are built on NREL's Standard Scenarios, for example, reports describing the scenarios can be found on the Standard Scenarios web site (https://www.nrel.gov/analysis/standard-scenarios.html).