Multi-Country Scale Assessment of Available Energy Recovery Potential Using Micro-Hydropower in Drinking, Pressurised Irrigation and Wastewater Networks, Covering Part of the EU

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

An obvious question concerning your paper is whether you think that the cross-country approach adds any value to the paper. If you do think that it does, I think that you ought to clearly explain what it is. In a more general sense, I wonder what target group(s) you are aiming at. You do not discuss the economic perspective, but I am rather convinced that, at the country level, there are more economical options for green energy. A utility manager will find it difficult to find any actionable results in the paper. If you do have a target group, you definitely have to explain how it can benefit from reading the paper.

If you start from basics, you find that it is essentially the topographical features that can create excess pressure in a pipe network. It doesn't matter whether the feature is located in Scotland or Spain. This also means that extrapolations from smaller to larger areas can be rather irrelevant, which actually seems to pointed out in ref [32]. Actually, it seems to me that your results, in general, suffer from from a very high degree of uncertainty.

Finally, I found Figure 5 to be of little help. In fact, I found it confusing. What exactly did you try to explain there?

Author Response

see attached

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

This is a very interesting study. I enjoyed reading the manuscript. Nevertheless, it needs some further improvements. In general, there are still some occasional grammar errors throughout the manuscript, especially the article "the," "a," and "an" is missing in many places; please make a spellchecking in addition to these minor issues. The reviewer has listed some specific comments that might help the authors further enhance the manuscript's quality.

1. Specific Comments

 

• Introduction
• The objectives should be more explicitly stated.
• What is the novelty of this work?

 

 

• Methods
• The methodology limitation should be mentioned. Also the constrains during the project development.

 

• Results
• This section is well written.

 

 

• Discussion

• The discussion should summarize the main finding(s) of the manuscript in the context of the broader scientific literature and address any limitations of the study or results that conflict with other published work.

 

 

 

Author Response

see attached

Author Response File: Author Response.docx