Realistic Nudging through ICT Pipelines to Help Improve Energy Self-Consumption for Management in Energy Communities
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Based on the information provided in this paper, some suggestions for improvement could be: 1. Provide more context: The paper could benefit from providing more context about the problem being addressed and its significance. This would help readers understand why the research is important and what impact it could have. 2. Clarify methodology: While the methodology used in the paper is described in detail, it could be further clarified to make it easier for readers to understand. This could include providing more information about the data sources used and how they were collected. 3. Expand discussion section: The discussion section of the paper is relatively brief and could benefit from being expanded upon. This would allow for a more detailed analysis of the results and their implications. 4. Include limitations: While the paper discusses some limitations of the study, it could benefit from a more comprehensive discussion of potential limitations and how they may have affected the results. 5. Improve language clarity: While the language used in the paper is technical and academic in nature, there are some instances where it may be difficult for readers to understand certain concepts or ideas. Improving language clarity through simpler sentence structures or additional explanations may help improve readability for a wider audience.
Author Response
We thank the reviewer for their numerous suggestions, which helped us improve the manuscript. Below, we answer point by point their remarks (in bold).
1. Provide more context: The paper could benefit from providing more context about the problem being addressed and its significance. This would help readers understand why the research is important and what impact it could have.
We thank the reviewer for this suggestion, which helps us better put into context our work. We have added a paragraph at the beginning of the Introduction, explaining that our research takes place at the intersection of:
1. the need to optimize the energy consumption of buildings;
2. the increasing usage of renewable energies in electric systems.
We explain that taking full advantage of renewable energies requires overcoming the challenges linked with their specificities, with respect to traditional energy systems, and that our work focuses on helping with the issue of the intermittence of generation.
2. Clarify methodology: While the methodology used in the paper is described in detail, it could be further clarified to make it easier for readers to understand. This could include providing more information about the data sources used and how they were collected.
To better present our methodology, we have done the following improvements.
1. We have added explanations about the data sources we use, in Section 4.1.
2. We have added a reference defining the self-consumption, and the self-sufficiency, rates, and a reference we took inspiration from for our concept of "green period".
3. We have added some technical details about the computations our controllers performed, in Section 3.4, as well as about the way we sample the Markov chain which represents the Weather, in Section 4.1.
3. Expand discussion section: The discussion section of the paper is relatively brief and could benefit from being expanded upon. This would allow for a more detailed analysis of the results and their implications.
In addition to the discussion of the limitations of our work, which was another point raised by the reviewer, we have added two paragraphs.
The first one discusses the magnitude of absolute improvements in the self-consumption, and the self-sufficiency, rates, and the probable need to reduce (not merely shift) electrical appliances usages in order to increase them further.
The second one is a paragraph discussing the importance to target households where nudging may be profitable, rather than sending nudges indiscriminately to any household endowed with solar panels. The targeting we suggest is based on our results. We also briefly discuss the costs such a targeting entails.
4. Include limitations: While the paper discusses some limitations of the study, it could benefit from a more comprehensive discussion of potential limitations and how they may have affected the results.
We have expanded our discussion section to discuss two important limitations of our study.
1. The main limitation of our study is the fact we assumed an idealized human behaviour, which is not accurate for real-life settings.
2. The second limitation is the forecast uncertainty, or error, which may lead *to bad labelling of green periods, resulting in incorrect information sent in the nudges.
We also discuss ways to address those.
5. Improve language clarity: While the language used in the paper is technical and academic in nature, there are some instances where it may be difficult for readers to understand certain concepts or ideas. Improving language clarity through simpler sentence structures or additional explanations may help improve readability for a wider audience.
We have reread carefully the text, and checked the spelling, in order to improve the language clarity.
We hope we have answered the reviewer's comments as clearly as possible.
Reviewer 2 Report
Thank you for setting up this important research project, the outcomes will be most eagerly awaited. The idea of having a restricted number of ‘green periods’ is good, because as you rightly say, users do not want to think about their energy using appliances all the time.
- Please introduce the term nudging pipelines more clearly in the introduction, so they can also be understood by non-ICT readers.
- Acknowledge cultural factors, for not everywhere people eat a cooked lunch.
EAcknowledge climate zone, because there is air conditioning supposed, which is not common in northern Europe.
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- You state that heating cannot be shifted, but you might consider that in a well-insulated building, with a low temperature heating system, heating (or cooling) can be shut off for short periods, without much influence on indoor temperature.
- In the discussion you refer to the phenomenon of energy communities, for which managing flexibility is even more complex. But this also has a lot of promise, because an EC can strive to be ‘zero on the (neighborhood) aggregator’, the community variant on 'zero on the meter'.
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- This article is highly technical, which is unfortunately not my specialty. So, I concentrated on the social implications and aspects of the study.
Author Response
We thank the reviewer for their numerous suggestions, which helped us improve the manuscript. Below, we answer point by point their remarks (in bold).
1.Please introduce the term nudging pipelines more clearly in the introduction, so they can also be understood by non-ICT readers.
In order to explain more clearly what we meant by nudging pipeline, we have
1. improved our description in the Introduction;
1. added some references in the literature review section (Section 2.1);
3. re-written the paragraph describing the pipeline in Section 3.5.
We hope these changes will enhance the readability of our presentation for non-ICT readers.
2. Acknowledge cultural factors, for not everywhere people eat a cooked lunch.
Acknowledge climate zone, because there is air conditioning supposed, which is not common in northern Europe.
We thank the reviewer for asking us to explicit the situation we had in mind, that of a French household. In this situation, cooking at lunch often happens. Though air conditioning is not as widespread as in the USA (say), its usage is increasing in France, so it seems reasonable to us to consider the household has air conditioning.
3.You state that heating cannot be shifted, but you might consider that in a well-insulated building, with a low temperature heating system, heating (or cooling) can be shut off for short periods, without much influence on indoor temperature.
We agree with the reviewer that there could be some ambiguity in our classification of air conditioning as not-shiftable. To clarify our choice, we have added the following explanation in the article:
"We classify air conditioning as non shiftable in this context of someone working from home during the afternoon, from a potentially badly isolated building. In such conditions, in order to maintain cool temperatures, the air conditioning system may need to run continuously."
4.In the discussion you refer to the phenomenon of energy communities, for which managing flexibility is even more complex. But this also has a lot of promise, because an EC can strive to be ‘zero on the (neighborhood) aggregator’, the community variant on 'zero on the meter'.
We thank the reviewer for pointing out that our formulation focused only on the technical issues of the task, but made no reference to its goal, which was indeed to help realise the potentialities of ECs. Therefore, we have added some sentences to make it explicit.
We hope we have answered the reviewer's comments as clearly as possible.
Reviewer 3 Report
ICT pipelines are introduced to improve self-consumption rates of households with renewables in energy communities. The topic is interesting. The reviewers have the following comments that might be helpful for authors to further improve the work.
The technical contents look a bit weak. Maybe the model description in the appendix can be moved to the body of the paper.
Review of existing works seem to be inadequate with only a few lines. Section 2.1 may be expanded. Technical journal papers of energy system optimization to better accommodate renewables may be supplemented such as 10.1109/TSG.2022.3210014 or 10.1016/j.energy.2016.02.044. But please note that the discretion of which papers to add is left to the authors.
The contribution may be better summarized into three points.
Is the self-consumption rate defined by yourself? Can you refer to some classical work that provides such definition? Same comment goes to "nudge".
The data in the Section 4 should be fully disclosed for reproducing the results.
Fonts in figures are too small.
Author Response
We thank the reviewer for their numerous suggestions, which helped us improve the manuscript. Below, we answer point by point their remarks (in bold).
1.The technical contents look a bit weak. Maybe the model description in the appendix can be moved to the body of the paper.
In order to keep the text readable for a large, and possibly non-technical, audience, we had tried to keep the technical details to the minimum, often relying on word explanations, rather than equations, to explain our procedure (as in the description of Controllers, in Section 3.4). In that spirit, we had delayed to the appendices the explanations of how we computed our forecasts, and of how the OMEGAlpes model, which we use as a reference, works.
However, we have added the equations defining the strength parameter, which is used to rank the green periods, for both the Weather, and Combined, controllers, in Section 3.4. We have also detailed technically how we sampled the Markov Chain representing the weather, in Section 4.1.
2. Review of existing works seem to be inadequate with only a few lines. Section 2.1 may be expanded. Technical journal papers of energy system optimization to better accommodate renewables may be supplemented such as 10.1109/TSG.2022.3210014 or 10.1016/j.energy.2016.02.044. But please note that the discretion of which papers to add is left to the authors.
We have expended the literature review Section 2.1. Precisely:
1. we have added a whole paragraph about the optimization of energy systems, quoting the references suggested by the reviewer, as well as two more references, the first a review of optimization tools for deployment of renewable energies into energy systems (https://doi.org/10.1109/PTC.2015.7232360), and the second introducing a framework for the optimization of such systems (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apenergy.2016.03.090); we have also commented on the relevance of the tool OMEGAlpes, which we already used in our work, and that we had already cited (https://doi.org/10.3390/en14185928).
2. we have added explanations, and 2 references, about Information and Communication Technologies, the first a review of their use in smart grids (https://doi.org/10.3390/s21238087), and the second studying the architecture required to include them as easily as possible into energy systems (https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics10040496);
3. we have have added the reference (already cited in the previous version, but not at this place) Shadid et al. 2020, "Designing and Experimenting Nudge Signals to Act on 651
the Energy Signature of Households and Optimizing Building Network Interaction", from which we had borrowed the concept of "green periods", in the nudges section.
3. The contribution may be better summarized into three points.
Following the reviewer's remark, we gathered what were previously contributions 3. and 4. into one single point (with two subpoints), which concerns the efficiency of our procedure (more precisely, characteristics having an influence of its efficiency).
We hope this reorganisation makes our contributions clearer.
4. Is the self-consumption rate defined by yourself? Can you refer to some classical work that provides such definition? Same comment goes to "nudge".
These definitions are classical, and we have included references https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/14/6/1591 and https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apenergy.2014.12.028 in our article to provide them.
Moreover, we have realised that what we called "self-production" was in fact commonly named "self-sufficiency", and we have modified our text accordingly, wherever needed.
As far as nudges are concerned, we had already quoted Thaler and Sunstein's book, "Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness", in the literature review in Section 2.1. To improve readability, we have added the reference in the introduction. Moreover, we have expanded slightly on the definition of nudges in Section 2.1. Finally, we have added the reference Shadid et al., "Designing and Experimenting Nudge Signals to Act on the Energy Signature of Households and Optimizing Building Network Interaction", from which we borrow the concept of "green period".
5. The data in the Section 4 should be fully disclosed for reproducing the results.
Unfortunately, one of the two datasets we used was proprietary (the Iris dataset), so that we are legally prevented from publishing it. However, the second one, AMPDS (http://ampds.org/), is fully public. Therefore, by using the code we have made public, the readers can reproduce a large part of our results. (Note also that, even though the Iris dataset is not public, all the code which we used to conduct numerical simulations on it is made public.)
6. Fonts in figures are too small.
We agree with the reviewer the fonts were too small. Therefore, in order to improve readability, we have redrawn all the figures, with larger fonts.
We hope we have answered the reviewer's comments as clearly as possible.
In addition to the point made by the reviewers, we have done the following small changes.
Change 1
We have added 8 references, including all the references suggested by the reviewers.
Change 2
We have changed the term "self-production" to "self-sufficiency" in our article to reflect common usage. Therefore, we now refer to it as self-sufficiency throughout the article.
Change 3
A bug was identified in our code related to the failure to send nudges between the start time and the first Sunday during simulation launch, which artificially downgraded the performances of our pipelines. This bug has been resolved, resulting in improved performances compared to the previous results. Consequently, all simulation results have been modified in our article.
Change 4
We have added a simulation in Section 4.5, which considers the whole Iris Dataset. In addition to the previous result, where the simulation averaged over all households in the dataset, we have added a simulation averaging separately over three subsets, based on the number of shiftable appliances in each house. The results, unsurprisingly, show that the more shiftable appliances there is in a house (all things equal), the larger the improvements we obtain when sending nudges.
Change 5
We had made a small mistake in the text, wrongly stating that the "strength of the green period", sigma, should take values in (0,1), in Section 3.3, Definition 2. We have corrected the Definition, to state that the strength is (only) non-negative.
Round 2
Reviewer 3 Report
The authors have made a sufficient revision to the paper and a clear response to me. Thanks for the efforts.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
We thank the reviewer for their positive appraisal of our work, and for helping us improve our work.
Yours sincerely,
Haicheng Ling
