Remote-Sensing-Based Estimation of Rooftop Photovoltaic Power Production Using Physical Conversion Models and Weather Data^†

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Please, see the attached.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Comments on the Quality of English Language

Author Response

We thank you for your thoughrough reading of our manuscript and we are pleased that you found it interesting. In the following, you'll find our answers to the questions that you raised. 

• It is suggested to name your method, so that the comparison presented on Figure 6 could be greatly improved

Thank you for this suggestion. On Figure 8, we compare two different parameterizations of our method, namely the Oracle and DeepPVMapper, which are defined in section 4.2.2., paragraph « Comparisons with the Oracle ». We added the mention « parameterizations » in the Figure caption (see the Figure 6 p.13 of the file revisions.pdf).

Regarding the naming of our method, which consists in the combination of weather data, a conversion model and PV system’s parameters to estimate PV power production curves at the individual installation level, we hesitated to name it but chose not to as it is a combination of existing methods (physical PV power production modeling and remote sensing of PV systems’ characteristics) and our aim is to assess whether this combination can accurately estimate the PV power production at the individual level of PV systems.

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This paper proposes a method of estimating rooftop PV power using physical models and weather data. The method is sound and the results are promising.

 

Specific comments,

1 More quantitative results should be added in the abstract. Moreover, the application or implications of results obtained from this study can be added in the abstract.

2 Some sentences are quite long. For instance, the second and third paragraphs are only one long sentence in section 6.45, which makes it hard to understand. The authors should try to divide these long sentences into several short sentences to make them more readable.

Author Response

We would like to thank you for your thoughrough reading of our manuscript and for your feedbacks. We've integrated them and we believe that it increases the quality of our work. Here are our answers to the revisions that you raised. 

1 More quantitative results should be added in the abstract. Moreover, the application or implications of results obtained from this study can be added in the abstract.

We thank the reviewer for this remark. We completed the abstract with the following sentences: “We report an average estimation error (measured with the pRMSE) of 10\% relative to the system size” and “more broadly, this study shows that limited information is sufficient to derive a reasonably good estimation of the PV power production of small-scale systems” (see lines 11-12 and 15-16 in revisions.pdf).

2 Some sentences are quite long. For instance, the second and third paragraphs are only one long sentence in section 6.45, which makes it hard to understand. The authors should try to divide these long sentences into several short sentences to make them more readable.

We thank the reviewer for this feedback. We edited the paragraphs between lines 398 and 405 (in revisions.pdf) to make it more readable. While proofreading the entire manuscript, we also simplified the following sentences:

• Lines 407-408 and 45 , we removed the following: “supplied by the non-profit association {\it Asso BDPV}” as it is redundant with what is said earlier in the paper,
• Lines 40-42 we rephrased the sentence “As underlined by \cite{saint-drenan_empirical_2015}, these characteristics are sufficient to estimate the PV power production using a conversion model and weather data” as “Moreover these charactersitics are sufficient to estimate the PV power production using a conversion model and weather data \cite{saint-drenan_empirical_2015}”.
• Lines 67-68 We removed the unnecessary mention “which use weather forecasts to estimate future renewable power production and” and replaced it by “and to estimate” to make the sentence shorted and more straightforward.

We hope that these changes will make our manuscript more understandable.

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This is an interesting paper with novel ideas.
You clearly state the limitis of your research and results in the conclusion of the paper and I fully agree with those. Perhaps it would be useful to inform the reader if this reearch is closed or if you are trying your porposed methos on a larget DB of data.

Author Response

We would like to thank you for the time spent on our manuscript. We are pleased that you found it interesting. Here are our anwsers to the points that you raised in your review:

You clearly state the limitis of your research and results in the conclusion of the paper and I fully agree with those. Perhaps it would be useful to inform the reader if this reearch is closed or if you are trying your porposed methos on a larget DB of data.

We thank the reviewer for pointing this out. As this project is still living, we added the following sentence at the end of our future works section : « Finally, we are gathering data from more systems to extend the significance of our results ». (see lines 428-429 of revisions.pdf)