Historic Building Renovation with Solar System towards Zero-Energy Consumption: Feasibility Analysis and Case Optimization Practice in China

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

In general

The topic of this study is important. However, this manuscript is more of a cross between a travel brochure and an essay than original research. This manuscript contains interesting results, but to understand these results, the manuscript needs to be rewritten and significantly shortened. This manuscript should be presented as a case study.

In specific

Lines 258-259. It was written “This figure far surpasses the global and national averages by a factor of 3.5 and 4 respectively, on a per capita basis”. To confirm this fact, a reliable literary source is needed.

 

Below is one of many examples of duplicate information.

Lines 284-285 It was written “This data highlights an imbalance in the heating and cooling demands within Hujia compound” (Materials and Methods).

Lines 317-319. It was written “There is currently a large imbalance in the building energy demand of the Hu compound, the heating demand of the building from November to March is much larger than the cooling demand of the building from April to October… ” (Materials and Methods).

Lines 321-323. It was written “…the heating demand is almost 4.7 times as much as the cooling demand, which visually demonstrates the imbalance in the building's energy consumption demand” (Materials and Methods).

Duplicate information throughout the manuscript should be removed.

 

Lines 434-436. It was written “After research, it was found that using a new and efficient ceramic-aluminum composite solar panel system can effectively meet these two requirements”.

It is unclear whether these studies were carried out by the authors of this manuscript or whether this is a date from the literature? If this is your own research, then the calculation method should be presented in the manuscript. If the source of this result is literature, a reliable source must be identified.

 

Formulas 1-5 should be in the “Materials and Methods” section.

Lines 459-509. This section contains both data for the “Materials and Methods” section and for the Results section. This section should be rewritten.

Lines 532-543. This sections contains three initiatives.

The reviewer views these initiatives as three main results.

Therefore, both the Introduction and Materials and Methods sections should be rewritten to clearly show the causal relationship between the introduction/methods and the three main results.

The Introduction section should contain three subsections to show the background of the results obtained in the current study.

The Materials and Methods section should contain three subsections demonstrating which materials and methods should be used to obtain these three main results.

Any other information should be removed from the manuscript.

Author Response

We are grateful for your positive evaluation of our research efforts and pointing out the shortcomings in our study. This study is only a preliminary study on the renovation of zero-energy solar system. Thanks so much for all the rewarding suggestions regarding paper improvements. We have made significant revisions accordingly (marked in green background in the updated version) The detailed revisions and point-to-point responses of your comments are highlighted as follows.Detailed modifications and peer-to-peer responses to your comments are shown in the attachment. (See the attachment for the details).

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Comments and suggestions for authors

 

Abstract paragraph: the authors should better explain the method used in the research. Too many characters in the abstract are dedicated to describing the background of the research (Lines 8-13).

 

Introduction paragraph: in the opinion of the reader the authors should add some background related to possible legislation or standards that may assign some cultural/historical constraints or requirements for historical buildings. The retrofit of historical buildings is possible without any kind of constraints (?). Or do the authors conduct only research on a hypothetical renovation for this kind of building? For instance, in Italy for historical buildings and in ancient urban districts there are many urban (zoning regulations) and landscape constraints to install PV systems or simply to change external windows or intervene on the external envelope. This issue should be addressed in the introduction paragraph. In fact, in lines 156-157, they refer to “protection of traditional heritage buildings”.

The novelty of the paper should be better highlighted and further comments about it are needed.  

 

Line 148: add some references to explain the “typical case of a heritage building”. The authors may conduct a kind of survey or know about some statistical data that allows them to consider this building type and its distinguished typological factor as typical. Please add some references.

 

Lines 216-264: this paragraph should be summarized by the authors. They only should describe the climatic parameters that they effectively used in the research work. Maybe the inclusion of a table could help to synthesise.

 

Figure 4: for better clarity, the title of the axis should be added to the graphs.

 

Line 275: the name and the set-up of the software (all the parameters set by the authors) should be detailed in the method section to better understand the results of energy consumption.

 

Method section: the thermal characteristics of the existing building should be included in the text (for instance thermal transmittance of the external envelope, stratigraphy, etc…). The main characteristics of the buildings should be added in this paragraph such as conditioning volume, surface, orientation, window-to-wall ratio etc. These are the main boundary conditions for energy simulations.

 

Lines 275-287 and Figure 5: this section ad the related figure 5 should be moved to the results paragraph.

In the opinion of the reader, Paragraph Status and problems is not suitable for the method section but it should be divided into 2 paragraphs to be moved to the introduction section (for instance lines 291-300). Lines 317-330: they are results. Figure 6 is not necessary. Or it should be included in Figure 1.

 

Results paragraph: the results paragraph should be improved. The description of the solar system (building improvement design) should be moved to the method paragraph highlighting the intervention measures proposed. They should not be described in the results section unless they are clearly useful to discuss outputs.

 

Lines 384-399: should be added in the introduction section to better clarify the background. Please refer also to the previous comment about the introduction paragraph. The same for lines 400-410.

 

Discussion paragraph: the discussion paragraph should be revised with respect to the results found in the simulations and the research presented in the background. A real discussion of the results obtained with the analyses performed with respect to the state of the art should be included. The limits of the study should be outlined in this paragraph.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Comments on the Quality of English Language

Minor editing of English language required.

Author Response

We are grateful for your positive evaluation of our research efforts and pointing out the shortcomings in our study. This study is only a preliminary study on the renovation of zero-energy solar system. Thanks so much for all the rewarding suggestions regarding paper improvements. We have made significant revisions accordingly (marked in green background in the updated version) The detailed revisions and point-to-point responses of your comments are highlighted as follows.Detailed modifications and peer-to-peer responses to your comments are shown in the attachment. (See the attachment for the details).

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Accept

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The authors improved the paper following all the corrections suggested and required by the reviewer.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

Minor editing of English language required.