Dynamic Reconfiguration Systems for PV Plant: Technical and Economic Analysis
, Filippo Pellitteri, Guido Ala, Rosario Miceli, Pietro Romano and Fabio Viola *
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
1) The introduction is poorly written failing to highlight the importance of this study.
2) Latin numbering of tables is wrong. Please revise.
3) This could be an interesting report, providing financial aspects of DRS in PV plants. However, I do not see any novelty, nor any scientific contribution. Authors are encouraged to highlight the scientific contribution, novelty, or significance of this work because I am failing to detect any.
4) References are formatted inconsistently. Please revise.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
you can find our response in attached file.
Best regards,
the Authors
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Dear authors,
your manuscript describes a mixed technical/economical analysis of DRS/PV plant. It’s interesting to read about different situations in different countries, different costs, technologies, lifetime, hardware complexity, indeed is a multivariate kind of analysis. The manuscript is sufficiently clear and sound, the research questions and the methodology are reasonable.
Overall I found the proposed study, a bit more than a literature review, it’s also true that your discussions are gathering/generating some insights and knowledge which is relevant.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
you can find our response in attached file.
Best regards,
the Authors
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
This paper is but a general economic analysis and the academic value contribution is not high. Besides, the results of economic analysis cannot prove and infer the last paragraph of the conclusion of this paper. In other words, it can’t conclude that the economic analysis on the use of innovative devices as a DRS in PV plant is main influenced by local installation, incentive policy, duration of incentives and life style of the people.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
you can find our response in attached file.
Best regards,
the Authors
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 4 Report
This paper presents an economic investigation of the application of Dynamic Reconfiguration Systems (DRS) for residential PV plants. Indeed there are cases were after some years a building or other structure is erected near the PV installation and the power output is strongly affected mainly due to shading. A DRS could indeed be considered in order to improve the performance of the affected systems.
The authors have chosen not to perform any technical modeling of the performance of the pv array under shading and have made 2 assumptions:
- The power reduction is 35%.
- The power increase due to the DRS is 10% and 20%.
In my opinion this is an oversimplification of how shading affects a PV array throughout the day and throughout the year and how the DRS can actually improve this situation especially taking in consideration that different countries with completely different solar irradiation profiles are compared together as if the comparison is made on the same basis. Furthermore, the different DRS systems are assumed to provide the same power increase not taking in consideration the technical performance of each solution which in reality would lead to different energy generation results. Because of these reasons the comparison of the results of different countries is purely speculative and is not based on solid technical grounds in order to draw any concrete conclusions.
Given that the authors are not using PV electricity generation data (either measured or simulated), they could have simply performed a sensitivity analysis of how the main variables (energy production per year, feed-in tariff, contract duration for feed-in tariff) affect the use of the 4 different DRS systems. This could provide the reader with much clearer insights.
The authors also state that a feed-in scheme is used. Under this principle an investment is not affected by the actual energy consumption of the household, since all electricity is sold to the grid and electricity is consumed from the grid based on the current tariff. It is not clear in the paper how the average household consumption and cost of grid electricity is taken into account when evaluating a feed-in investment. That would have been the case if a net-metering scheme was considered.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
you can find our response in attached file.
Best regards,
the Authors
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
My comments have been adequately addressed.
Author Response
My comments have been adequately addressed.
Reply: the authors thank the reviewer for his time and his professionalism put available to evaluate and improve our scientific article
Reviewer 3 Report
The authors have major revised the manuscript and mostly addressed reviewer's concern.
Author Response
The authors have major revised the manuscript and mostly addressed reviewer's concern.
Reply: the authors thank the reviewer for his time and his professionalism put available to evaluate and improve our scientific article
Reviewer 4 Report
The authors have addressed most of the comments and consequently the paper can be considered for publication after addressing some minor comments.
Since the authors have included a experimental results in the new section, it will greatly complement the section if the below data are reported as well. Most probably all of this data has been logged.
- Solar irradiation data (global irradiation on the horizontal or the plane of the array)
- Ambient temperature data
- Date of the performed experiment (day/month)
Author Response
The authors have addressed most of the comments and consequently the paper can be considered for publication after addressing some minor comments.
REply: the authors thank the reviewer for his time and his professionalism put available to evaluate and improve our scientific article
Since the authors have included a experimental results in the new section, it will greatly complement the section if the below data are reported as well. Most probably all of this data has been logged.
- Solar irradiation data (global irradiation on the horizontal or the plane of the array)
- Ambient temperature data
- Date of the performed experiment (day/month)
Reply: Thank you for the suggestion, data are now in the paper.
