pypsa-meets-earth/pypsa-earth

docs: Revamp Plotting & Summary Visualization Documentation

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#1,751 opened on Mar 11, 2026

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Description

Describe the feature you'd like to see

Please give a clear and concise description and provide context why the feature would be useful. Also, we'd appreciate any implementation ideas and references you already have.

Summary

The previous Plotting documentation section was removed during the MkDocs migration (PR #1638) as it was not particularly meaningful in its current state — it mainly contained an outdated color palette image with limited practical guidance.

However, plotting and result visualization are an important part of the PyPSA-Earth workflow and deserve proper documentation.

Scope

Create a new, comprehensive Plotting & Visualization documentation page that covers:

  • Summary scripts — Document how make_summary.py and plot_summary.py work and what outputs they produce
  • Result visualization — How to visualize network results (generation mix, line loading, etc.)
  • Color palettes — Technology color schemes used in PyPSA-Earth plots (kept up-to-date with the actual config)
  • Jupyter notebook examples — Link to or embed example plotting notebooks
  • Custom plotting — Tips for users who want to create their own visualizations from PyPSA outputs

Context

  • Removed in PR #1638 (MkDocs migration)
  • Original review comment by @ekatef: "Currently, the section is not particularly meaningful, except the palette picture which could get outdated. While the plotting and summary is certainly an important part, I wonder if it could be a sensible solution to drop this section for now adding an issue on tackling this part?"

Acceptance Criteria

  • A new doc/user-guide/plotting.md page with practical, up-to-date content
  • Corresponding entry added back to mkdocs.yml navigation under User Guide
  • At least one working example or screenshot of typical plot outputs

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