Long-Term Scenario Analysis of Electricity Supply and Demand in Iran: Time Series Analysis, Renewable Electricity Development, Energy Efficiency and Conservation

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

To improve the quality of the article, several parts must be revised. There are still many minor mistakes in the draft of articles, namely the use of punctuation marks, as has been commented on in the attached draft. The placement of the citation number from the referenced bibliography must follow the usual rules. If the author's name appears in the text, the citation number follows the author's name. If the statement is quoted from the bibliography, the citation number is placed after the statement. All figures and tables must be satirized, and the satirical narration must appear before the figures or tables appear. The header of the table must appear on the table link in case the contents of the table cannot be loaded on the previous page. For Figure 12, add an explanation why in 2025 it is predicted that there will be a significant change in the accumulative cash flow? Please look further at the draft that has been commented on.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Manuscript ID: sustainability-2249383

Response to Reviewers

It is our pleasure to respond to the Reviewers' comments on our paper, "Long-Term Scenario Analysis of Electricity Supply and Demand in Iran: Time Series Analysis, Renewable Electricity Development, Energy Efficiency, and Conservation" for publication in the special issue of "Sustainable Integration of Renewable Power Generation Systems". Your detailed comments and valuable suggestions on our paper were very useful to us, and we appreciate the time and effort you put into reviewing our manuscript. Reviewers' suggestions have been incorporated in most cases. In the revised manuscript, those changes are highlighted with "track changes". A point-by-point response to the reviewers' comments can be found below in blue.

Reviewers Comments:

Reviewer 1:

1. To improve the quality of the article, several parts must be revised. There are still many minor mistakes in the draft of articles, namely the use of punctuation marks, as has been commented on in the attached draft. The placement of the citation number from the referenced bibliography must follow the usual rules. If the author's name appears in the text, the citation number follows the author's name. If the statement is quoted from the bibliography, the citation number is placed after the statement. All figures and tables must be satirized, and the satirical narration must appear before the figures or tables appear. The header of the table must appear on the table link in case the contents of the table cannot be loaded on the previous page. For Figure 12, add an explanation why in 2025 it is predicted that there will be a significant change in the accumulative cash flow? Please look further at the draft that has been commented on.

We would like to say thank you to the reviewer for the useful comments to improve the paper. We have addressed all the comments as explained in the attached PDF file. Accordingly, punctuation marks, placement of citation numbers, figures, tables, and their narration, as well as the repetition of the tables’ header on the new page are modified in the whole manuscript. Also, we went through the entire manuscript to eliminate spelling/grammar mistakes.

According to Figure 12, the significant change in the cumulative cash flow is caused by the difference in the interest rates of the seller and buyer countries. According to Eq. 15 and Eq. 19, the capital value and electricity sales increase exponentially with time. Interest rates directly affect how much value increases. The interest rate in Iran is higher than in China. Changes in electricity sales - which will be sold in Iran - are calculated at Iran's interest rate, but changes in capital value are calculated at China's interest rate. The summation of their cumulative form gives an exponential graph like Figure 12. In 2024 and 2025, Iran can export excess electricity. In this duration the prices are different, causing the variation with the rest of the graph.

We have added the suggested content to the manuscript in the last paragraph of section 4.3.

Reviewer 2 Report

This paper evaluates the resources management in Iran in terms of the electricity production. In this research, three scenarios under the titles of “Trend continuation”, “Renewable electricity development”, and “Energy efficiency and conservation” have been analyzed.

 

The topic is interesting. However, the reviewer thinks that the contribution of the paper should be highlighted. In order to enhance the quality of the manuscript, please consider including the comments below.

 

1. How to determine the orders p, d, q of AR term, MA term and the differencing should be explained clearly in this paper..

 

2. How to determine all unknown parameters of exponential smoothing (EST) models should be shown in this paper.

 

3. Please give more explanations about the results displayed in Table 13. Why would primary solid biofuels and biogas have a high share in 2040?

 

4. It would be better to more the Nomenclature into the beginning of this paper.

 

5. More references about how to provide solar power forecasting results should be also added into this paper. For example, “Recent advances in intra-hour solar forecasting: A review of ground-based sky image methods”, is suggested to be included in literature reviews.

 

6. There are many typos in references which should be double checked and correct with the same format. Also, some of the papers have been presented with incomplete information.

 

7. The authors are invited to perform a thorough proofread of their manuscript, as I can still spot some spelling/grammar mistakes in the paper.

 

Author Response

Manuscript ID: sustainability-2249383

Response to Reviewers

It is our pleasure to respond to the Reviewers' comments on our paper, "Long-Term Scenario Analysis of Electricity Supply and Demand in Iran: Time Series Analysis, Renewable Electricity Development, Energy Efficiency, and Conservation" for publication in the special issue of "Sustainable Integration of Renewable Power Generation Systems". Your detailed comments and valuable suggestions on our paper were very useful to us, and we appreciate the time and effort you put into reviewing our manuscript. Reviewers' suggestions have been incorporated in most cases. In the revised manuscript, those changes are highlighted with "track changes". A point-by-point response to the reviewers' comments can be found below in blue.

Reviewer 2:

This paper evaluates the resources management in Iran in terms of the electricity production. In this research, three scenarios under the titles of “Trend continuation”, “Renewable electricity development”, and “Energy efficiency and conservation” have been analyzed.

The topic is interesting. However, the reviewer thinks that the contribution of the paper should be highlighted. In order to enhance the quality of the manuscript, please consider including the comments below.

1. How to determine the orders p, d, q of AR term, MA term and the differencing should be explained clearly in this paper.

Thank you for the nice reminder. There are two methods to determine the p, d, and q values:

1. a) First is the Auto-ARIMA built-in method available in the “pmdarima” library in Python. This tool calculates the p, d, and q automatically based on the given data.
2. b) Second is the manual method. We used this method in the present work. Several steps were taken to determine the orders p, d, q of AR term and MA term:
3. i) Both AR and MA models require the stationarity of the data. Stationarity means that the observations are not dependent on time. In the present study, we checked the data with AD Fuller test. They were non-stationary. Thus, we needed to convert them into stationary.
4. ii) Differencing is one of the popular ways to convert non-stationary data to stationary one. In this method, we subtract each value from its previous value (w_t=y_t - y_t-1). We did this process d times continuously and checked the stationarity until the data transformed into the stationarity. The order d can be determined by this procedure.

iii) The q order can be determined using ACF plot, and the p order can be determined using PACF plot (Section 3.1.1, order selection). To determine the order of the model, it is required to check the values to be below the significant level. The cut-off point would be the order q and p. Also, the p-value method is most often used by researchers to check whether a certain pattern they have measured is statistically significant or not. Here, we used the lower than 0.05 p-value to find the orders q and p.

1. iv) We also used the AIC and BIC test to check how well our model fits the dataset without overfitting. Moreover, the normal distribution of the residuals for the model indicates the appropriateness of the selected model.

We went through the entire section 3.1 to make it clearer.

2. How to determine all unknown parameters of exponential smoothing (EST) models should be shown in this paper.

Thanks for your comment. The hyperparameters in the Holt method are determined by a trial-and-error process. We continuously calculated the MAPE and MSE by changing the hyperparameters to achieve high accuracy. This process is a popular method to achieve hyperparameters.

Accordingly, the relevant content is mentioned in the last paragraph of section 3.1.2.

3. Please give more explanations about the results displayed in Table 13. Why would primary solid biofuels and biogas have a high share in 2040?

Table 13 is an overview of the results achieved from the second scenario. As part of this scenario, the potential of each renewable resource has been explored in Iran, Germany, China, Spain, Sweden, and the UK. Renewable energy has been used to produce electricity for a very long time in these countries. Additionally, countries like Iran that are transitioning to renewable energy may have similar development patterns, although their resources must also be taken into account. For each of these countries, we calculated the annual growth in electricity production per capita by resource over the past 20 years. Iran's potential is compared with that of these countries. The per capita production of electricity in each of these countries is projected as the expected trend for the next 20 years. Afterward, production targets are calculated for each resource in 2040. In section 3.2, the second paragraph, a detailed description is mentioned.

For example, the annual growth of electricity generation per capita by kinds of bioenergy is calculated and shown in Table 8. Iran’s high potential in bioenergy is mentioned in the first paragraph of section 3.2.6. Consequently, we considered Germany and Sweden as a trend pattern for Iran.

4. It would be better to more the Nomenclature into the beginning of this paper.

Thanks for your comment. The nomenclature, abbreviation, symbols, etc. in the Journal of Sustainability are brought at the end of the paper. These are some examples: our previous paper “Machine learning and deep learning in energy systems: A review” and “Social Media Adoption and Financial Sustainability: Learned Lessons from Developing Countries”

5. More references about how to provide solar power forecasting results should be also added into this paper. For example, “Recent advances in intra-hour solar forecasting: A review of ground-based sky image methods”, is suggested to be included in literature reviews.

Thanks for your comment. The suggested paper was added to the literature.

6. There are many typos in references which should be double checked and correct with the same format. Also, some of the papers have been presented with incomplete information.

Thank you for the nice reminder. We accordingly checked all the references. Some references had been abbreviated. We changed them to a full name form. Moreover, detailed information was added to references which are not informed completely. Furthermore, we tried to prevent bringing website references.

It was inevitable to bring some sites as references. We needed new data for calculations, such as currency exchange, electricity, natural gas, power plant equipment prices as well as electricity consumption, and population, which are difficult to find in articles.

7. The authors are invited to perform a thorough proofread of their manuscript, as I can still spot some spelling/grammar mistakes in the paper.

Thank you very much for the reminder. We went through the entire manuscript to eliminate spelling/grammar mistakes.

Reviewer 3 Report

1-The main objectives of this paper are to evaluate the resources management  in Iran in terms of electricity production. Three scenarios are used to do this analysis. However, it is not clear for me whether these three scenarios didn't considered in any previous study or not. The authors have to mentioned that clearly in the introduction section.

2- You need to compare the conclusion of this research with the recent published work about this topic. 

3- The quality of figure 11 is not good. Figure 12 is too big.

4- Figure 1 and  10 are identical. there is no difference between the two figures. Why? please delete one of them and modify text to refer to the other one.

5- references are not suitable ( journal and conference paper should only included in this section and websites should be minimized.

Author Response

Manuscript ID: sustainability-2249383

Response to Reviewers

 

It is our pleasure to submit a revised version of our manuscript, "Long-Term Scenario Analysis of Electricity Supply and Demand in Iran: Time Series Analysis, Renewable Electricity Development, Energy Efficiency and Conservation" for publication in the special issue of "Sustainable Integration of Renewable Power Generation Systems". Your detailed comments and valuable suggestions on our paper were very useful to us, and we appreciate the time and effort you put into reviewing our manuscript. Reviewers' suggestions have been incorporated in most cases. In the manuscript, those changes are highlighted with "track changes". A point-by-point response to the reviewers' comments can be found below in blue.

 

Reviewer 3:

1. The main objectives of this paper are to evaluate the resources management in Iran in terms of electricity production. Three scenarios are used to do this analysis. However, it is not clear for me whether these three scenarios didn't consider in any previous study or not. The authors have to mentioned that clearly in the introduction section.

Thanks for your comment. All three scenarios have novelties. In the first scenario, we used time series algorithms rather than traditional scenario planning methods. In the second scenario, we set targets for renewable development based on the potential. In the third scenario, we conduct a comprehensive economic analysis of gas turbines to combined cycle conversion.

We emphasized these novelties in the last paragraph of the introduction.

2. You need to compare the conclusion of this research with the recent published work about this topic.

Thank you for this suggestion. It would have been interesting to explore this aspect. However, in the case of our study, it seems slightly out of scope. Scenario analysis is the process of estimating the expected value of a portfolio after a given change in the values of key factors take place. The changes given in each of the scenarios in the studies may not be the same. Therefore, the results obtained would not be comparable.

3. The quality of figure 11 is not good. Figure 12 is too big.

Revised accordingly.

4. The quality of figure 11 is not good. Figure 12 is too big.

Revised accordingly.

5. Figure 1 and 10 are identical. there is no difference between the two figures. Why? please delete one of them and modify text to refer to the other one.

Thank you for pointing this out. Figure 10 is changed, accordingly.

6. References are not suitable (journal and conference paper should only include in this section and websites should be minimized.

Revised accordingly. It was inevitable to bring some sites as references. We needed new data for calculations, such as currency exchange, electricity, natural gas, power plant equipment prices as well as electricity consumption, and population, which are difficult to find in articles.

Reviewer 4 Report

In this article, three scenarios from 2021-2040 have been defined for Iran's  electricity status. The manuscript is well prepared. 

The following comments can be accomplished to enhance the quality of the article:

1-  Probably it is important to carry out the study with any conventional algorithm to assess the accuracy of the achieved results with the ARIMA. algorithms.

 

Author Response

Manuscript ID: sustainability-2249383

Response to Reviewers

 

It is our pleasure to submit a revised version of our manuscript, "Long-Term Scenario Analysis of Electricity Supply and Demand in Iran: Time Series Analysis, Renewable Electricity Development, Energy Efficiency and Conservation" for publication in the special issue of "Sustainable Integration of Renewable Power Generation Systems". Your detailed comments and valuable suggestions on our paper were very useful to us, and we appreciate the time and effort you put into reviewing our manuscript. Reviewers' suggestions have been incorporated in most cases. In the manuscript, those changes are highlighted with "track changes". A point-by-point response to the reviewers' comments can be found below in blue.

Reviewer 4:

In this article, three scenarios from 2021-2040 have been defined for Iran’s electricity status. The manuscript is well prepared.

The following comments can be accomplished to enhance the quality of the article:

1. Probably it is important to carry out the study with any conventional algorithm to assess the accuracy of the achieved results with the ARIMA. algorithms.

Thanks for your comment. In the present paper, we have used three various algorithms including Single Exponential Smoothing, Triple Exponential Smoothing, and ARIMA to carry out the study, compare, and validate the achieved results. Table 10, 11, and 12 show the obtained results from the algorithms.

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

No further comments

Reviewer 3 Report

the paper can be accepted.