PCLM-D-25-00367

Energy scenarios for the decarbonisation of the building stock in the context of the energy system transformation

PLOS Climate

Dear Dr. Tosatto,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS Climate. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS Climate’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

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We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Federico d'Amore, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS Climate

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Additional Editor Comments:

Kindly see the reviewers’ comments below, which recommend a major revision of the manuscript.

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

-->Comments to the Author

1. Does this manuscript meet PLOS Climate’s publication criteria ? Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe methodologically and ethically rigorous research with conclusions that are appropriately drawn based on the data presented.-->

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Partly

Reviewer #4: Yes

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-->2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?-->

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: N/A

Reviewer #3: N/A

Reviewer #4: Yes

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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

Reviewer #4: Yes

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-->4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS Climate does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.-->

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

Reviewer #4: Yes

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-->5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)-->

Reviewer #1: The manuscript by Tosatto and co-workers focuses on a highly relevant and timely study on decarbonisation pathways for the Austrian building stock by 2050 and points out on the urgency to couple evolving national and continental energy systems. These authors critically evaluate existing building-level scenarios against three system configurations to account for different boundary conditions such as the demand-independent energy system based on the current Austrian electricity mix, a net-annual Renewable Energy (RE)-based system connected to international grids with unlimited import/export possibilities and an autarkic RE-based system requiring seasonal storage.

Overall, the manuscript is a methodologically sound and significant contribution to the energy and climate policy literature. Anyhow, in the opinion of this reviewer it still deserves minor revisions before it can be accepted for publication in PLOS Climate.

While the Introduction effectively establishes a framework of efficiency, sufficiency, and consistency, the exclusion of sufficiency measures from the analysis should be briefly justified beyond their dependence on variable human behavior. Finally, to strengthen the manuscript layout, I would suggest integrating the core concluding remarks from Section 5 (Discussion) into a combined “Discussion and Conclusions” section. This will improve the narrative flow, enhance clarity for readers, and shorten the document.

Once these minor revisions are addressed, I believe the manuscript will be suitable for publication.

Reviewer #2: The manuscript addresses an important and timely topic: the interplay between building-stock decarbonisation measures and the structure of future renewable-based energy systems. While the topic is valuable, the manuscript in its current form requires major revisions. Methodological aspects limit the robustness, reproducibility and generality of the conclusions. Many modelling assumptions are insufficiently justified, particularly with respect to the representation of neighbouring countries, energy imports, renewable energy considerations, and deployment feasibility.

Below I provide my detailed comments.

Major comments:

1. In the modelling of energy imports from surrounding countries, in the interconnected scenario (Case B), the imports are treated as unlimited, with no seasonal availability limitations. The fixed average CO2 intensities are assigned to imports regardless of time of year, or of country. Could the authors comment on how these assumptions may contradict the fundamental behaviour of European power systems, where all central-European countries may experience similar winter deficits?

2. In Case B the authors conclude that the energy mix remains a key driver of emissions even under a BAU building stock. However, since imports are represented via an average CO2 intensity, how sensitive is this conclusion to the actual hourly or marginal generation mix of neighbouring countries? As neighbouring countries are not modelled and may themselves face winter deficits, how meaningful are the numerical results?

3. The assumption of zero CO2 emissions for all renewable electricity and biomass-based district heating and CHP are not supported by life cycle assessment evidence. RE is indeed low carbon, it is not carbon neutral. Biomass in particular exhibits upstream emissions and land use impact. Assigning 0 gCO2eq/kWh to all renewable electricity (PV, wind, hydro) and to biomass-based district heating ignores life-cycle emissions, upstream impacts, land-use issues, and auxiliary energy use. How are these assumptions impacting the robustness of the results?

4. Renewable potentials are treated at technical-potential level without consideration of land use, network capacity, or deployment constraints, or economic constraints. Since the analysis focuses exclusively on decarbonisation, could the authors clarify how they ensure their proposed generation and storage expansions are at least physically plausible, even if not cost-optimised?

Minor comments:

5. As written, the building-stock mathematical model cannot be independently reproduced, which is a core requirement for a manuscript – the model and equations in the current form are ambiguous. A better clarification of each equation term and equations description is needed to make this methodology reproducible.

6. Manuscript structure and format:

6a. The introduction is very long. The detailed literature review is a strong aspect of this manuscript, but the structure of the Introduction section is confusing. A clearer introduction structure would improve the manuscript.

6b. A clearer narrative connecting the literature review with the manuscript’s aim and goal is required. The identification of research gaps from the literature review, the contributions of this manuscript to address these research gaps, and the novelties presented in this manuscript together with the research aim and objectives of this research need to be more clearly stated.

6c. British English spelling is mixed with American English spelling: “optimized”, “minimized” etc.

7. All building-stock and energy-system outcomes are imposed exogenously rather than derived from an objective function (optimisation framework). Does this limit the analytical value of the results? The authors should explicitly acknowledge this in the discussion section.

Recommendation

The manuscript addresses an important research question but requires methodological strengthening, and stronger motivation for the modelling assumptions before it is suitable for publication. I recommend the manuscript to be accepted after major revisions.

Reviewer #3: The reviewer thanks the author for their contribution on decarbonisation of the building stock in the context of the energy system transformation. The authors developed two scenarios (BAU and BEST) based on different ambition levels and combines them with different configurations of the energy systems.

The work is timely and the authors have collected valuable datasets but the paper needs to be better streamlined in the introduction and methodology sections.

More specifically:

- Sections 1.1-1.3 can be significantly shortened, at the moment the introduction reads more like separate literature reviews on different topics rather than a coesive document.

- Section 1.3 gives an overview of policy interventions but it is not clear how these have been considered when developing the scenarios.

- Some concepts like the efficiency/sufficiency/consistency ,or the importance of the boundary definition are reintroduced with similar wording multiple times.

- Section 2 repeats concepts from section 1.4

- Section 3 repeats the research questions and scenarios already introduced in section 2. Additional details are given in Section 3 but I would suggest combing both in a single section.

I think by better structuring these sections the authors could both improve readibility and clarity of the manuscript, and perhaps better highlight the unique contributions of this work compared with what has already been done in literature.

Variables in Equation 1 are not defined. My understanding is that W_AT,mix,M needs to be equal to W_Load while the terms between parethesis need to sum up to 1, and the breakdown in given in Table 2. If this is the case I don't think the equation is necessary.

The results are clearly presented but sometimes they are overinterpreted into a broader energy system context that goes beyond what the model simulate. The insights are interesting but I think the reader could benefit from a clearer distinction between what the model directly calculate and what is inferred more conceptually based on the authors intuition and expert knowledge.

Reviewer #4: Dear Authors,

I carefully read your work and I think it is very interesting with an high scientific soundness.

Moreover, it is written with a good English and it is well structured. Methodologies and Results are well presented, as well as Results are well discussed and the Conclusions are well supported by the obtained results.

However, the Introduction is too long (10 page of Introduction I think is too much), and I strongly suggest summarizing this part avoiding any repetition. In particular, paragraphs 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 can be summarized in a single paragraph, and also paragraph 1.4 cab be reduced.

In addition, all figures need to be replaced with higher resolution ones.

For the rest, I left detailed comments in the attached .pdf.

Sincerely.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #3: No

Reviewer #4: No

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Attachments

Attachment

Submitted filename: PCLM-D-25-00367_Reviewer.pdf

Energy scenarios for the decarbonisation of the building stock in the context of the energy system transformation

PCLM-D-25-00367R1

Dear Ms. Tosatto,

We are pleased to inform you that your manuscript 'Energy scenarios for the decarbonisation of the building stock in the context of the energy system transformation' has been provisionally accepted for publication in PLOS Climate.

Before your manuscript can be formally accepted you will need to complete some formatting changes, which you will receive in a follow-up email from a member of our team.

Please note that your manuscript will not be scheduled for publication until you have made the required changes, so a swift response is appreciated.

IMPORTANT: The editorial review process is now complete. PLOS will only permit corrections to spelling, formatting or significant scientific errors from this point onwards. Requests for major changes, or any which affect the scientific understanding of your work, will cause delays to the publication date of your manuscript.

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Thank you again for supporting Open Access publishing; we are looking forward to publishing your work in PLOS Climate.

Best regards,

Federico d'Amore, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS Climate

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Additional Editor Comments (if provided):

Reviewer Comments (if any, and for reference):

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

-->Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.-->

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #3: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #4: All comments have been addressed

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-->2. Does this manuscript meet PLOS Climate’s publication criteria ? Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe methodologically and ethically rigorous research with conclusions that are appropriately drawn based on the data presented.-->

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

Reviewer #4: Yes

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-->3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?-->

Reviewer #2: N/A

Reviewer #3: N/A

Reviewer #4: N/A

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-->4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available (please refer to the Data Availability Statement at the start of the manuscript PDF file)?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception. The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.-->

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

Reviewer #4: Yes

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-->5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS Climate does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.-->

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

Reviewer #4: Yes

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-->6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)-->

Reviewer #2: (No Response)

Reviewer #3: All my comments have been addressed.

Reviewer #4: Dear Authors,

I think your manuscript improved a lot than te previous versione and it ca be accepted as it is.

Sincerely

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-->7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean? ). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy .-->

Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #3: No

Reviewer #4: Yes: Jessica Maria Chicco

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