An Empirical Study on the Efficiency and Influencing Factors of the Photovoltaic Industry in China and an Analysis of Its Influencing Factors
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The manuscript presents a DEA-based analysis with data from Chinese domestic companies. The present study clearly shows efficiency of the Chinese PV industry, some suggestions and its result analysis are quite subjective not considering statistic data or relevant references. Another thing I would like to recommend is that it would be better if authors mention regarding toxicity or environmental issue of PV industry, which is critical in some east Asian countries. In detail, the followings should be carefully resolved:
Page 1, line 30 – As a scientist and engineer in the PV field more than 10 years, solar energy itself can considered as a renewable and clean energy source. However, PV manufacturing contains toxic process (such as HF for Si and Cd for CIGS, CdTe, as shown in Practical Handbook of Photovoltaics: Fundamentals and Applications, 2003, pp. 858–867; Thin Solid Films, 2013, vol. 535, pp. 162–165.) and this makes a huge hurdle for wide implication in some Asian countries, specifically, in South Korea. Page 2, line 64 – Even the mentioned analysis methods (CCR and etc.) are common in the field, their full names should be mentioned at least once before use of the abbreviation in the manuscript. Page 4, line 180 – The top 25 solar PV enterprises….in Table 1 – Actually, 24 companies in total. Page 6, line 197 – Typo – Photoelectric, not Optoelectronics. Page 6, line 205 – “anti-dumping and anti-subsidy survey” – These are quite region and country-dependant factors. I strongly suggest to provide relevant references and to list the name of the country, for instance, EU or Germany. Page 6, line 210 – As suggestions understand, the rebound of PV trend in China likely owes to the export market diversification. If this is right, relevant reference or data is needed.
Author Response
Please see the attachment
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
In the manuscript, the authors built the DEA model to respectively evaluate the efficiency of photovoltaic devices and power generation in the photovoltaic industrial chain, and used Tobit model to make empirical analysis of the factors affecting the efficiency of photovoltaic industry.
The topic of the paper is interesting as well as the academic contribution of the work, but the authors should improve their work according to the following indications.
1. The authors should discuss more international situation, regulations, and approaches, and should motivate their research to be of high interest for a even broader group of addressees.
2. In the introduction, the following relevant studies in the filed should be considered:
- “An Evaluation of Energy and Economic Efficiency in Residential Buildings Sector: A Multi-Criteria Analisys on an Italian Case Study”, International Journal of Energy Economics and Policy, 2018, vol. 8(3), pp. 185-196; http://econjournals.com/index.php/ijeep/article/view/6255
- "Economic sustainability of ground mounted photovoltaic systems: an Italian case study", International Journal of Energy Sector Management, vol. 9(2), pp. 156-175, doi: 10.1108/IJESM-04-2014-0007;
- https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/4806619
3. The authors should explain how the article has been structured by presenting the different sections.
4. The authors should discuss how the results can be interpreted in perspective of previous studies and of the working hypotheses.
5. Policy implications should be more addressed.
6. Limitations of the study and future research directions should be addressed.
7. Tables and figure should report the sources.
8. Extensive editing of English Language and style is required.
Author Response
Please see the attachment
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
The paper is of good quality it can be accepted as it is.
Author Response
Dear Editor:
On behalf of my co-authors, I would like to express my gratitude for giving us an opportunity to revise our manuscript.
We have studied reviewer’s comments carefully and have made marked in the paper. We have tried our best to revise our manuscript according to the comments and we trust the amendments have answered all the questions and issues raised by the referee.
We would like to express our great appreciation to you and reviewers for comments on our paper.
Thank you for handling this revision and we look forward hearing from you.
Yours sincerely
Hao Cai
Jiaping Xie
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
I concede that the manuscript has been improved significantly after the authors have addressed the reviewers' comments thoroughly. Most of the responses from the authors are acceptable and understandable. However, I receive a strong impression that authors underrate the potential risk of toxic pollution emission from the PV industry. Recent studies from Chinese research groups also warn the risk of toxicity of PV waste and its risk in some cities in China. It is plain fact that current PV growth partially relies on the governmental subside and lax regulation on the pollution from the renewable energy industries. Except for this point, other responses are acceptable.
Author Response
Thanks again for your thoughtful comments and suggestions on our paper.
Firstly, we recognize that the PV industry is a highly polluting and energy-intensive link at the manufacturing end, but it is a clean and environmentally friendly link on the consumer side. Therefore, this article has measured the two links separately, hoping to promote the gradual balance of the photovoltaic industry chain. But unfortunately, we did not describe this part clearly in the introduction, so we have re-described it in the introduction. Please refer to section 1.
Secondly, we recharged the way we calculate variables. GDP represents the overall development of each province and city. PV efficiency is related to the total economy, not per capita GDP, so we replaced it and used logarithm to indicate the effect of the percentage change in GDP on efficiency. In order to more clearly see the impact of China’s existing PV installation on efficiency, we used logarithm to represent the impact of the percentage increase in power generation scale. Similarly, CO2 is also expressed in logarithm to examine the effects of this variable growth.
In conclusion, GDP per capita was changed to GDP (in logs), CO2 emissions are converted to logarithmic form (ln CO2). We reanalyzed the industry model and explained it in detail. Please refer to section 5.2.
Reviewer 2 Report
The authors improved the manuscript according to the suggestions of my previous review report. Therefore, I suggest the acceptance of the paper in present form.
Author Response
We thanks again for your thoughtful comments and suggestions on our paper!
