Evaluating the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Residential Energy Use in Los Angeles

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

First of all: I really like your work. It draws from many sources and brings different things into one context (including income, searches in search engines, unemployment...) The conclusions are very interesting and one can draw further conclusions for other settings / areas

There are some sentences where I do not understand structure and/or content. Here, simplification would help to make the paper more readable.

Also, there are some abbreviations that are not familiar to me, and should be explained.

 

l. 25-27: content understandable, but sentence is strange 

l. 75-77: do not understand this sentence (For temperature ...)

L. 108-113 not clear

l. 173-175: I do not understand sentence structure and what you mean

l. 179 NPL load? (I thought NPL already includes load)

l. 209-210: content not clear

l. 210-213: sentence structure

l. 267-271: sentence very long, structure unclear

l.314-318: what do you mean by >25% activity (is it SIP activity?)

l. 380-382: sentence?

l. 384: fig not found ..

l. 408 parentesis opens and does not close, sentence structure and content unclear

l. 417-419: I do not understand this sentence (undersampling?)

L. 465-466: sentence unclear

Fig. 7: line colors are similar to each other, text is very small

Fig.9: does 100% mean that nothing changed? (this would be misguiding as in other places 0% means nothing changed) And to what is change measured? I do not get it. The same question for other figures in appendix.

l. 627: bay->may

 

Formulas (1): x (x1, x2) are missing

 

 

abbreviations to be explained:

EM&V

LADWP

CP

MST

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

1. Authors should consider providing a Glossary of abbreviations used.
2. Given that the paper is quite long and contains a very large number of numerical values, the authors should condider moving some Tables, Figures (and their accompanying text) to the Supplementary data or to put them in new Appendices. It is presently easy for the reader to get lost in the wealth of detail provided. An example might be temperature normalization. Also, for the data presented in Figure 8, perhaps just one graph could be provided in the text, and the rest put in Supp data or Appendices.
3. Lines 382-384: resolve problem.
4. Lines 385-389: Figure 3 is not included.
5. Lines 504-514 : The authors might expand their comments on why the Pecan St (Texas) values were higher than in the present study.
6.  Line 614: presumably 'cases' refers to covid-19 cases?

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

The authors present findings from a regional evaluation in the city of Los Angeles, California, USA with broad application and demonstrate a methodology to isolate major loads from community energy use. Stay-at-home behavior generally tracks early public directives and provides the framework for interpreting shelter in place (SIP) response and the impact on energy usage. The paper is well structured and documented. The conclusion must be improved.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 4 Report

• Missing Figure in lines 382-385
• Figure 7. Improve size (especially legends) and consider combine different types of lines (dashed, point by point) to increase and facilitate readibility. Consider to increase size of the figures
• Figure 9. Improve legends, size of lines and size of text, to improve quality and reability of the Figures

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx