Solar Energy Potential on Surfaces with Various Inclination Modes in Saudi Arabia: Performance of an Isotropic and an Anisotropic Model
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Suggestions to the reviewers should be canceled. For example p1l26 ..(article's novelty),,,,
Erase the highlights
Author Response
See attached document.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
The authors present the performance of an isotropic (Liu-Jordan) and an anisotropic (Hay) model in assessing the solar energy potential of Saudi Arabia.
The article reports an original research however the description in the Introduction section doesn’t include analysis and conceptual of existing literature.
I suggest to include the following articles:
Sciuto, G. L., Capizzi, G., Caramagna, A., Famoso, F., Lanzafame, R., & Woźniak, M. (2017). Failure Classification in High Concentration Photovoltaic System (HCPV) by using Probabilistic Neural Networks. Int. J. Appl. Eng. Res, 12, 16039-16046.
Capizzi, G., Sciuto, G. L., Napoli, C., & Tramontana, E. (2017). Advanced and adaptive dispatch for smart grids by means of predictive models. IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid, 9(6), 6684-6691.
The images and tables are very explicative, on the other hand there are some grammatical mistakes in the document, which sometimes affect the understanding of the article. Please check carefully.
130 The data of this work is exactly that of the 3 previous studies ????
Data are !!!
- It must be said here that no statistical metrics are employed for the ISO and HAY modelling results as no real solar radiation measurements exist at the selected sites with which comparison could be made.
You can write …
- No statistical metrics are used for ISO and HAY modeling results ….
211Figure 3 shows the variation of the annual solar energy sums for the 82 sites, the configuration modes of solar systems, and both ISO and HAY models. It must be emphasised here that all calculations have been done by using an annual-averaged near-real ground-albedo value, ρg, for each site.
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Reviewer 3 Report
The manuscript: "Solar Energy Potential on Surfaces with Various Inclination Modes in Saudi Arabia: Performance of an Isotropic and an Anisotropic Model" presents the current scientific issue related to the comparison of isotropic and anisotropic in assessing the energy potential of solar radiation.
I believe that the manuscript may be admitted to the next stages of the procedure provided that the following comments are taken into account:
1. The manuscript is a case study of theoretical analysis for one country, which significantly limits the possibility of implementing the presented results in other locations.
2. The presented research methodology applies only to theoretical / numerical analyzes, without comparison to the empirical results (obtained by the authors themselves, but for selected locations). This would allow the results of the obtained analyzes to be verified.
3. Statistical analysis of the computational results of both methods (ANOVA) should be supplemented with an analysis of the variance matching, eg using a statistical test such as Fisher-Snedecor, and then verified with the Newton's method, along with the determination of directional coefficients and coefficients of determination.
Author Response
See attached document.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
The article can be accepted in the present form.
Reviewer 3 Report
The authors revised the manuscript in line with my main comments. I believe that mynauscript may be admitted to the next stages of the procedure.
This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The manuscript requires fundamental corrections before the next consideration. I propose rejecting and resubmitting after corrections. please consider the following comments:
- The research gap and novelty are lost in the abstract and introduction section
- results have not been presented in a proper way.
- The main direction of results is lost.
- The dataset requires a statistical analysis such as ANOVA
- results section must include discussions
- Conclusion needs to be re-written
- The structure of the manuscript requires corrections before the next submission
Reviewer 2 Report
This paper presents the solar energy potential in Saudi Arabia. The new contributions are not significant.
- Please check the reference style in main text.
- Table 1 was presented in reference [28]. It is recommended to mark only the important regions rather than listing all regions.
- In section 2.2, the method for data processing and analysis is presented. Here, various references are used. What is the new contribution in this section?
- The main contribution of this paper is an investigation of solar energy potential in Saudi Arabia. I think this is not appropriate for a journal. What are the new methodologies applied for the works?
Reviewer 3 Report
This paper investigated the performance of an isotropic and an anisotropic model in assessing the solar potential in Saudi Arabia. Generally it is well organized and illustrated. My suggestions are as follows:
1) Even though this paper focus on spatial analysis of renewable energy, it is still recommended to briefly introduce the time series analysis of renewables, such as deep learning-based method in [R1] and SARIMA-based method in [R2].
[R1] Nam K J; Hwangbo S; Yoo C K. A deep learning-based forecasting model for renewable energy scenarios to guide sustainable energy policy: A case study of Korea. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 2020, 122: 109725.
[R2] Xiao D; AlAshery M K; Qiao W. Optimal price-maker trading strategy of wind power producer using virtual bidding. Journal of Modern Power Systems and Clean Energy, 2021.
2) It would be better if contributions are further summarized point by point.
3) What is the computational cost of fitting the spatial statistics models of isotropic and anisotropic model? It is recommended to add more information to verify its applicability considering actual decision time frame in practice.
4) The future research works on this research topic can be added in the conclusion section.
