Incorporating Elicited Preferences for Equality into Electricity System Planning Modeling

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Authors have well written the manuscript and presented the work in a nicer way. Moreover few points are required to update.

1. in abstract - need to include information related to novelty and innovation of this work, which can motivate research of the same field

2. section-1: Better to rename section-1 as "Introduction" and if it is required to mention "Background & Motivation", kindly create new sub heading within main heading of section-1

3. in section 1, kindly include a summary table which can highlight at least following information: reference number, year of publication, method use, novelty, further enhancement requirement, relation with proposed approach etc.

4. Equation (1) is related to find the max value of an objective function. so write max as a subcript of U(x,p)

5. in figure3, kindly include the value of each bar to make it more understandable

6. the font size of each figure should be uniform

 

Comments on the Quality of English Language

minor grammar check is required

Author Response

Please see attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The article analyses the methodology for determining the preferences of stakeholders making investment decisions regarding the choice of electrification planning method for countries located in sub-Saharan Africa. The study was carried out on 9 investment variants differing in the value of iso-elastic utility function depending on the population size in energy supply nodes and energy consumption per capita, taking into account the parameter a reflecting preferences for equality regarding individual consumption per capita. The study is conducted on a group of students and involves them selecting individual network variants arranged in 36 pairs. The results were prepared using the Bernoulli log-likelihood function, which estimates the value of a used by the study participants when making their choices. The impact of the a value on total energy consumption, total CO2 emissions and water consumption was also analysed. The text prepared by the study participants regarding their preferences when choosing variants, changes in the a value due to the nationality and gender of the respondents was also examined, and an uncertainty analysis of the obtained results was carried out.

In conclusion, the authors state in line 501: In this paper, we "determined" how to integrate elicited preferences for equality.

Taking into account the substitute group of students used in place of decision-makers and the future research that the authors plan to conduct, the verb "propose" seems more appropriate instead.

The authors state that the novelty of our paper lies in the creation of a framework that determines stakeholders' preferences for equality and integrates those preferences into an electricity planning model. Such a statement is quite eager considering the course of the investment planning process. In this process, variants are assessed on the basis of, for example, ensuring equality in terms of energy consumption per capita and not on the basis of the value of the rather difficult parameter a. In order to make the article more readable, it would be good to compare the adopted values a with the corresponding consumption per capita a=f( r_i) e.g. in tabular form. Without such reflection, it will be more difficult to convince real decision-makers, who are not students, to consider using the proposed methodology.

Additionally the authors should consider pasting the tiers associated with the characteristic per capita electricity consumption to the considered network schemes.

Since the study is already completed, for a better interpretation of the results, it would also be good to provide the values of a associated with individual schemes of electricity supply (Fig. 4).

In addition, it would be good to clarify the following points:

·        Why are the diagrams marked with the letters B and C in Fig. 2 differ from the diagrams b and c in Fig. 4?

·        In Fig. 4 we have 7 diagrams for the total number 9 - it would be better to supplement it with the two missing ones.

·        What is the difference between diagrams f and g in Fig. 4?

Additionally, the reviewer noted some minor errors detailed below:

·        CkV parameter should be given in Table 1 in $/MWh.

·        lack of keywords at the beginning of the article,

·        in the text in line 358, fig. 3-4 should be fig. 4.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

In this paper, the Authors explore how the integration of elicited preferences for equality into an electricity system planning model may affect the investment decisions concerning technology deployment. A general framework in the form of a statistical estimation model is analyzed in order to determine decision makers’ preferences for equality. In general terms, this is a simple but interesting paper where different scenarios for the sub-Saharan Africa are examined. In the Reviewer’s opinion, the conclusion that female decision makers have higher preferences for equality than their male counterparts when making infrastructure investment decisions is the most catching part of the paper without underestimating the Figures 2, 4 and 5. Only few Reviewer’s suggestions are given so that the paper can be considered to be acceptable for publication:

·         Figure 8, “For some individuals, the uncertainty range on their recovered alpha values shows that they have a dominantly high preference for equality. However, some individuals, typically those with lower equality preferences, demonstrates a large uncertainty range.”: Please explain this observation by corresponding FXXXXX with the cases.

·         Conclusions, “Additionally, we found that female decision makers have higher preferences for equality than their male counterparts when making infrastructure investment decisions”: The percentages with their respective variances should validate this assertion. In the Reviewer’s opinion, this behavior finding is one of the most significant contributions of this paper.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Thank you for the explanations and additions to the article.

Author Response

Thank you very much for your feedback!