Strategies for the Resilience of Power-Coal Supply Chains in Low-Carbon Energy Transition: A System Dynamics Model and Scenario Analysis of China up to 2060
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Dear Authors,
I am happy to have had the opportunity to review your paper and find it very good. The topic of the paper is very timely in the politics of decarbonisation. Everyone is discussing coal and green energy and how the transformation to net zero CO2 emissions will change the industry. The Chinese economy is important in this transition, and it is important to write about it as much as possible.
I very much enjoyed the research part of the paper, I have no comments on it, except that a could be limited to three places after the dot, e.g. 1.235
I miss the literature section and the discussion section of the paper, while the discussion could be dispensed with because the empirical section is the core of the paper, the literature review, which needs to be after the Introduction, cannot be dispensed with. The literature list (currently 25 references ) is not enough. That is why I have indicated in the review:
Are all the cited references relevant to the research must be improved.
Please introduce a literature section the paper will be great.
In the literature section, reference can be made to the nature of supply chains, to the specific decarbonisation of economies in different countries and even industries, as well as to the smart technology that streamlines many functions in Industry 4.0.
Best wishes
Reviewer
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
Thank you for your comments concerning our manuscript. Those comments are valuable and very helpful. We have read through comments carefully and have made corrections. Based on the instructions provided in your letter, we uploaded the file of the revised manuscript.
Point 1: I am very much enjoyed the research part of the paper, I have no comments on it, except that a could be limited to three places after the dot, e.g. 1.235
Response 1: Thank you for your suggestion. We modified the values of a in Table 2 and Table 3 so that they meet the requirement.
Point 2: Please introduce a literature section the paper will be great.
Response 2: Thank you for your suggestion and we add a literature review section after introduction to introduce relevant research, which summarizes the research work in the power-coal industry and the research of the system dynamics method in the energy supply chain.
Sincerely,
Authors
Reviewer 2 Report
Dear Author
The manuscript is need to improve and strengthen. My comments are follows.
1) Author need to revise the abstract and make it more clear and crisp.
2) Add value addition in the introduction by highlighting the importance
3) Contributions are not clear; it need to rewrite.
4) Highlight some were gap of the research.
5) How your study is differ form others study, it should be highlight in the manuscript.
6) Suggest to add more into policy implication section, limitation of the study and future research directions.
7) The contribution of the study should be more oriented towards the policy, rather than being method-focused.
8) Policy recommendations need to shift and should come after conclusion.
9) The discussion should also concentrate on comparing the results with existing studies.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
Thank you for your comments concerning our manuscript. Those comments are valuable and very helpful. We have read through comments carefully and have made corrections. Based on the instructions provided in your letter, we uploaded the file of the revised manuscript.
Point 1: Author need to revise the abstract and make it more clear and crisp.
Response 1: Thank you for your suggestion and the abstract has been rewritten. To make it clearer, we add some specific results.
Point 2: Add value addition in the introduction by highlighting the importance
Response 2: Thank you for your suggestion and we add a Literature review section after introduction. In line 157, by summarizing the existing literature, we found that the current research has the following shortcomings:1) Lack of research on the power-coal industry as a whole;2) Insufficient attention to the dynamics of power coal supply chain;3) Lack of national-level power coal supply chain system dynamics model. Our research will address these questions
Point 3: Contributions are not clear; it need to rewrite.
Response 3: Thank you for your suggestion and we have rewrite it in the manuscript and make it more policy-oriented.
Point 4: Highlight some were gap of the research.
Response 4: Thank you for your suggestion and we add a Literature review section after introduction. And at the end of this section, we summarize the research gap and difference with others.
Point 5: How your study is differ form others study, it should be highlight in the manuscript.
Response 5: Thank you for your suggestion and we add a Literature review section after introduction. And at the end of this section, we summarize the research gap and difference with others.
Point 6: Suggest to add more into policy implication section, limitation of the study and future research directions.
Response 6: Thank you for your suggestion and we add more content in the manuscript. Firstly, in line 519 we have enriched the main body of policy implications. Secondly, for the limitation of the study, we mainly consider the spatial and temporal resolution of the data, the transportation network and the Chinese coal market and the world coal trade, etc. Therefore, in future research, on the one hand, it is hoped to improve the resolution of the model and introduce the coal market mechanism, and on the other hand, it is hoped to use mathematical programming methods to optimize each link of the thermal coal supply chain. In addition, it will be future work to include other types of coal in the research scope
Point 7: The contribution of the study should be more oriented towards the policy, rather than being method-focused.
Response 7: Thank you for your suggestion and we have rewritten the contribution in the manuscript and make it more policy-oriented.
Point 8: Policy recommendations need to shift and should come after conclusion.
Response 8: Thank you for the suggestion. We are very sorry for the structural problems of the article. Since this is a policy-oriented article using a model for simulation, we very well understand that you feel that the results of the model should be followed by policy recommendations. In fact, your suggestion is consistent with the structure of our article. In the results and discussions section, we discuss and summarize the results of the model, while the policy implications section explains the practical policy significance of the model results. The final conclusion section is a summary of the entire article, including the background, methods, model results, policy recommendations, shortcomings of the article, and future work. Our sincerest apologies if we didn't fully appreciate your suggestion.
Point 9: The discussion should also concentrate on comparing the results with existing studies
Response 9: Thank you for the suggestion and we add comparisons with other studies. China's coal security is an emerging issue in recent years, so there is still relatively little research on strategies for China's power-coal supply chain to deal with future dynamics. We select the research of Wang et al. and Yang et al. to compare with our research, hoping to illustrate the reliability and importance of the research direction and research content, in line 491.
Sincerely,
Authors
Reviewer 3 Report
The topic of this manuscript is aimed at exploration of long-term trend of energy coal production and consumption. From my point of view, it meets the scope of the journal and could be of interest to the readers.
In General, methodological part is well-prepared, explained and organized. Results and discussion section is also clearly presents obtained findings.
I have only minor comments, which could enhance the readability and attractiveness for the reader:
1. It would be better to add specific results in the abstract.
2. Literature review is superficial. Almost all references are concentrated in the first three paragraphs, which don't provide enough detailed overview of 1) segments of coal industry 2) specifics of Chinese coal industry 3) application of system dynamics models to solve similar problems.
3. Line 127. Please, confirm that it is Analogic, not Anylogic.
4. Line 228. "relevant fitting parameters are obtained as follows". Provide details.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
Thank you for your comments concerning our manuscript. Those comments are valuable and very helpful. We have read through comments carefully and have made corrections. Based on the instructions provided in your letter, we uploaded the file of the revised manuscript.
Point 1: It would be better to add specific results in the abstract.
Response 1: Thank you for your suggestion and the abstract has been rewritten. We have included the main results of the model study, that power-coal redundancy will increase from 1.13 to 1.32 and power-coal production capacity is expected to be reduced by 250 million tons by increasing inventory.
Point 2: Literature review is superficial. Almost all references are concentrated in the first three paragraphs, which don't provide enough detailed overview of 1) segments of coal industry 2) specifics of Chinese coal industry 3) application of system dynamics models to solve similar problems.
Response 2: Thank you for your suggestion and we add a literature review section after introduction to introduce relevant research, which summarizes the research work in the power-coal industry and the research of the system dynamics method in the energy supply chain.
Point 3: Line 127. Please, confirm that it is Analogic, not Anylogic.
Response 3: We are very sorry for the typo and sincerely appreciate your reminder.
Point 4: Line 228. "relevant fitting parameters are obtained as follows". Provide details.
Response 4: We are grateful for the suggestion. As suggested, we have added more details of fitting process in line .In fact, we use Origin to fit historical data by creating a new fitting function in the form of equation (16).
Sincerely,
Authors
