Analysis of Solar Energy Development Strategies for a Successful Energy Transition in the UAE
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
An analysis of solar energy development strategies for a successful energy transition in the UAE is reported by Mohsen Salimi, Morteza Hosseinpour, and Tohid N. Borhani. The article is dealing with the solar energy production and consumption in the UAE as of today. SWOT analysis stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, it is reported for the different types of solar energy and strategies were developed based on it. 4 strategies are proposed to accelerate the energy transition in the UAE.
The article is well structured and written, a number of sources are used. Most references and discussions of charts are limited by 2020. It is advisable to check new references from 2021 and the first half of 2022. These references can be used to update the Introduction section and the rest of the article. The language of the article is fine, some minor typos can be corrected. Some statements are not proved by the references, e.g., page 8: "Abu Dhabi National Oil Company and Emirates National Oil Company Group national service stations will receive hundreds of more employees in the next years [34]." No such statement can be found at this link. This statement can be discussed keeping in mind the crude oil and gas prices growth after 2020.
Author Response
please find the attached file
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The paper is good, but there are some issues:
- Figures quality are not good. You have to improve them.
- Care about the copyright of some figures. Please read the journal policy.
- The contribution needs more clarifications in the intro section.
- Proofread the paper before the next submission.
Author Response
please find the attached file
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
The manuscript by Borhani et al. presents a very comprehensive investigation on the current situation of solar energy utilization in the UAE with SWOT analysis. Despite the systematic study, the manuscript seems not agree well with the scopes and aims of the Processes journal which should focus on more about detailed research in chemistry, materials, energy, and other engineering fields. I would suggest the authors to submit this manuscript to other MDPI journals like energies, which would be a better fit.
Besides the above, I found there are some issues in the manuscript.
The most important part is about the figures. I realized most of figures are cited from other literature as reference. Would it be necessary to use all of them? At least from my point of view, the figures in the introduction part are not very useful. For example, would Figure 1 be necessary to stress the importance of power demand? I think the authors can directly use the reference and describe the situation with one sentence. However, the description for this part seems very confused. In the second paragraph of introduction: “As seen in Figure 1, almost every year, the electricity demand in the UAE has grown in 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic”. I think the authors want to explain why the demand in 2020 decreases instead of explaining pandemic causes demand increase.
Other issues like the discussion in Section 3, the authors listed lots of data about the energy capacity of solar plants and so on. Would it be possible to make these data into figures, tables, or charts that would be much easier to understand?
Author Response
please find the attached file
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 3 Report
I think the authors had resolved my concerns quite well. I do not have any further comment on this and would suggest formal acceptance in this special issue.
