Comparison of the Greenhouse Gas Emission Reduction Potential of Energy Communities

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The manuscript I reviewed presents the study on the greenhouse gas emission reduction potential, which is under the journal scope.

Overall, the manuscript is well written, and the structure is very good. Design of the presented study is adequate, results are clear for it to provide a concise conclusion.

There are some corrections suggested that should be considered to improve the final version of the paper before its accept.

Methodologically, what is the reason of including the selected technologies in this study such as photovoltaic (PV) systems, battery-electric vehicles (BEVs), battery energy storage systems (BESS), and heat pumps (HPs) is not clearly explained, in addition, the authors commented that they play an important role in the energy transition in the built environment, however this should be proven, or I would recommend to avoid such statements without solid reference.

The introduction section does not reflect the literature review based on journal articles at adequate level, which means, that only four references corresponds to the respected journal articles and others are based on reports and some data sources, this should be entirely revised at adequate level to include more useful references that are expected in scientific papers. Otherwise, it looks like a report for the project purpose and lacks research depth, without exceeding the limits of a case study, since the research is not framed in a theoretical context based on an extensive review of the broad international literature on this topic. This section should be significantly improved and adequately presented.

Basically there are too many statements in the introduction section that are not supported by the adequate reference source for it to prove authors´ ideas e.g. first sentence “In order to reduce the environmental impact of energy use in the built environment, an increasing number of photovoltaic (PV) systems, battery-electric vehicles (BEVs), battery energy storage systems (BESS), and heat pumps (HPs) are being deployed across Europe”, then “The targeted technologies, i.e. PV, BESS, HPs and BEVs, play an important role in the energy transition in the built environment”, etc. this should be reconsidered throughout the text and such statements should be supported with solid reference.

Conclusions and Discussion section should be improved, there are many results presented in the text, however, this section is poorly written. Again, it looks like a report for the project purpose, where the core (the second and third section) is adequately analyzed and presented, however the rest parts needs to be improved. It should be more fostered to sound scientific discovery to solve research problems, thus needs to be presented in a more constructive way.

Formally, there are not all abbreviations included in Abbreviation section, please complete. e.g. LCA, AEF, DSM, HP, BESS, PV etc.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

This is a good paper. However, the references are few on the LCA of greenhouse gas emissions reduction potential of renewable energy, electric vehicles and battery combinations. See, e.g.:

Wu, Z. et al. 2018. Life cycle greenhouse gas emissions reduction potential of battery electric vehicle. Journal of Cleaner Production, 190, 462-470.

Miller, I. et al. 2019. Parametric modeling of life cycle greenhouse gas emissions from photovoltaic power. Applied Energy, 238, 760-774.

Pehl, M. et al. 2017. Understanding future emissions from low carbon power systems by integration of life-cycle assessment and integrated energy modeling. Nature Energy, 2, 939-945.

Asdrubali, F. 2015. Life cycle assessment of electricity production from renewable energies: review and results harmonization. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 42, 1113-1122.

Also, a variety of minor editorial changes should be noted:

 

Line 5 - insert "an" before "individual"

Line 24 - change "for" to "to"

Line 60 - "LCA", spell out, 1st use

Line 69 - "scope 2 emissions" ??

Line 78 - change "to" to "into"

Line 91 - change "nor" to "or"

Line 92 - delete "a"

Line 103 - delete 2nd use of "GHG"

Line 106 - change "1" to "1a and 1b"

Line 112 - change "shortfall" to "shortcomings"

Line 116 - delete "to obtain"

Line 117 - change "2" to "2a and 2b"

Line 120 - change "3" to "3a and 3b"

Line 121 - change "is" to "are"

Line 141 - insert "they" after "hence"

Line 150 - insert a comma after "0.5"

Line 158 - change "that" to "which"

Lines 160, 173 & 174 - change "was" to "were"

Line 186 - delete "simply"

Line 190 - delete the comma

Line 191 - change "with" to "by"

Line 192 - insert a comma before "respectively"

Line 193 - change "include also" to "also include"

Line 202 - delete

Table 1 - change title to "Results of economic optimization, from [4]"

Line 221 - change "produces" to "produce"

Line 229 - change "a number of" to "several"

Line 232 - change "France who" to "France, which"

Line 236 - delete "a further striking notion, which is"

Line 237 - change "Belgium. This" to "Belgium, which"

Line 242 - change "Portugal, and Germany" to "Portugal, Germany"

Line 255 - change "does mean" to "means"

Figure 5 caption, line 2 - "delete "eight"

Line 266 - insert "e.g." before "in France"; and insert a comma after "Furthermore"

Line 273 - insert "the" before "result"

Line 274 - change "much" to "high"

Line 279 - change "play" to "plays"

Line 327 - insert "from" after "effects"

Line 328 - change typo, from "consisten" to "consistent"

Figure 6 caption, line 2 - change "is" to "are"

Line 343 - change "variety" to "variation"

Line 344 - change "of" to "from"

Line 363 - change "two latter" to "latter two"

Figure 7, 8 & 9 captions, line 2 - change "is" to "are"

Line 367 - insert "that" after "time"

Line 369 - change "mainly used" to "used mainly"; and change "at times that" to "at times when", appears twice

Line 369, just above equation at bottom of the page, change "only used" to "used only"

Line 379 - change "are" to "is"; also insert "since" before "emissions"

Line 382 - change "to "to "for"

Line 401 -delete the first comma

Line 420 - delete "different"

Line 431 - change "life cycle analysis" to "LCA"

Line 441 - insert "The" before "authors"

Line 451 - rename as "Explanation for Treatment of Missing Data"

Line 452 - rename as "Explanation for treatment of "Other" categories"

Line 457 - delete the comma

Line 464 - rename as "Explanation for allocation of missing data in Italy"

Line 470 - change "lie" to "are"

Line 472 - insert "data" after "transparency", written twice

Line 478 - change "is" to "are"

Line 480 - change "baseload" to "baseloaded"

Line 484 - delete "indeed"

Line 487 - insert "fuel" after "baseload"

Line 490 - change "is" to "are"

Line 491 - insert "the" before "Italian"

Line 493 - change "Oil" to "oil"

Line 496 and 503 - insert "data" after "transparency"

Line 500 - change "during 2017, namely on 1 July." to "on 1 July 2017."

References - please add web links where available for all web sources listed.

Lines 531 and 534 - do not use all caps.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

In this contribution, the greenhouse gas emission reduction potentials of electric vehicles, heat pumps, photovoltaic (PV) systems and batteries were determined in eight European countries. The differences using prosuming electricity as a community and prosuming as the individual household was calculated. The text is well written, and the results and conclusions are presented clearly. Some minor improvements are recommended as follows:

Some acronyms have not been properly defined including LCA, HEFcon, HEFcons A more in-depth description of the input data source would be desirable. 

For the reviewer after including the recommended minor changes, the paper is a proper form for publication. 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The manuscript seems to be revised properly and has improved in accordance to reviews.

Although there is a detailed authors´response provided, a version with "track change" should be provided. With the current format it is not feasible to track the revised parts effectively. Please, provide a track version of your revised manuscript.

Author Response

Point 1: The manuscript seems to be revised properly and has improved in accordance to reviews.

Although there is a detailed authors´response provided, a version with "track change" should be provided. With the current format it is not feasible to track the revised parts effectively. Please, provide a track version of your revised manuscript.

Response 1: Please find attached a document tracking the changes made, compared to the first submission. Regarding the Reference lists, we refer to the pdf versions without the tracked changes. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 3

Reviewer 1 Report

The Introduction chapter is fine now. The context of the work is given, relevant research is shown and the aspects addressed in the paper are highlighted clearly. 

The discussion and conclusion section is improved as well.