Energy Journal Response to Reviewers: How to Write a Rebuttal That Survives Major Revision (2026)

Reviewers at Energy read your rebuttal alongside the revised manuscript and the marked-up copy you upload in Editorial Manager. A clean, scannable structure is doing real work here. Copy this skeleton, then replace the bracketed text with your own changes, and set the reviewer's comment in bold so a systems-modeling referee can find each numerical reply at a glance.

Dear Editor,

Thank you for the opportunity to revise our manuscript the manuscript title
(EGY-[ID]). We are grateful to the reviewers for their careful
reports. In response, we have added [techno-economic analysis /
system-integration study / mass and energy balance], revised
Figure [N], and strengthened the energy-systems framing in the
Introduction and Discussion. A point-by-point response follows;
reviewer comments are in bold and our replies in plain text, with
revised-manuscript page and line numbers given for every change.

----------------------------------------------------------------
Reviewer 1

Comment 1.1: "The paper reads as a single case study; the
system-level advance is unclear."
Response: We agree the advance was under-stated. We have added a
generalized formulation and a sensitivity analysis (new Section
3.4) showing the result holds across [parameter range], and
reframed the contribution as [system-level claim]. Changed text
appears on page 6, lines 4 to 19, and page 18, lines 8 to 22.

Comment 1.2: "No techno-economic analysis is provided."
Response: We have added a levelized-cost-of-energy calculation
(new Table 4) comparing the proposed system with [baseline]; the
LCOE is [value], a [X]% reduction. Methods are on page 11, lines
2 to 14; results on page 15, lines 1 to 9.

----------------------------------------------------------------
Reviewer 2

Comment 2.1: "The energy balance does not close; conversion
losses are not accounted for."
Response: We have added a full mass and energy balance (new
Supplementary Table 2) accounting for [losses]; the balance now
closes to within [tolerance]. See page 9, lines 10 to 21.

Comment 2.2: "Grid integration and intermittency are not
addressed."
Response: We have added a system-integration analysis with an
hourly dispatch model (new Figure 5) covering seasonal variation
and storage sizing. Revised text is on page 13, lines 3 to 17.

We believe the revised manuscript now demonstrates a clear
energy-systems advance with a credible techno-economic case, and
we look forward to your decision.

Sincerely,
[Corresponding author, on behalf of all authors]

The template carries the four tokens reviewers actually scan for: a letter to the editor, a Reviewer 1 / Reviewer 2 structure, explicit action language ("we have added", "we have revised", "we have reframed"), and a page and line reference for every change.

State the exact page and line number for each manuscript revision, and name the specific figure, table, or supplementary file you changed. The reason is concrete to Energy's review style. An Energy referee is usually checking one thing: did the new levelized-cost table or closed energy balance actually land? If they have to hunt for it in a long revised file, they read the silence as evasion.

A reviewer who can click straight to page 15, lines 1 to 9, and see the LCOE result finishes faster and re-reviews more favorably. Two rules make that possible:

• Never write "we have addressed this in the manuscript" without a location.
• Use the line numbers from the revised file, not the original, and flag when a change lives in a Supplementary table rather than the main text. At Energy an energy balance and a sensitivity analysis often go to the supplement, so the reviewer needs to know where to look.

Make the reviewer's words and your reply visually distinct. Put each reviewer comment in bold or a colored text box, and keep your response in plain regular text directly beneath it. The handling editor and the two or three reviewers scan dozens of these letters, and a rebuttal where comment and reply blur together costs you the attention you need to land a system-level argument.

The distinction is not cosmetic at Energy. A single reply here often carries two things at once:

• A numerical result, such as an LCOE figure or a closed energy balance.
• A framing argument, such as why this is a system-level advance rather than another case.

A reader who cannot tell where the reviewer's question ends and your answer begins will skim past the number that actually resolves the comment.

Both reviewers see your tone across every comment, and the editor reads the whole letter before deciding. A defensive reply to Reviewer 1 is visible to Reviewer 2. Calibrate.

The pattern that works: concede where the reviewer is right, do the quantitative work, point to the exact change, and push back only on a request that is genuinely out of scope, with a reason and a stronger alternative analysis in its place.

Who is reading your rebuttal

Energy is a quantitative, practice-relevance-driven engineering journal, and the reviewer pool reflects it. External review typically uses 2 to 3 reviewers, and SciRev author reports average about 2.5 reports per first round. That pool often includes a referee with industry or systems-modeling experience who will press on deployment realism.

The handling editor integrates the reports and decides what a revision must demonstrate, so your letter to the editor matters as much as the per-reviewer replies. Energy reviewers are calibrated to ask one question first: does this paper advance an energy system, or is it a component result wearing an energy label?

The clock you are working against

SciRev community data rates the manuscript-handling process 3.1 of 5.0 and reports a first review round of roughly 3.4 months. ScienceDirect's own journal-insights metrics report about 23 days to first decision, about 76 days to decision after review, and about 149 days to acceptance, with immediate rejections arriving within about 10 days.

The practical reading: Energy sorts fast at the desk, then takes real time in full review. Once you are in revision, the original reviewers will be watching for whether you did the analysis or restated the abstract.

What "major revision" actually means here

A major revision at Energy carries a specific meaning. It typically requires a stronger energy-systems advance, a techno-economic analysis, or both, and the journal usually gives authors 30 to 60 days to respond before the revised manuscript goes back to the original reviewers.

The defining feature is the real-relevance bar. Energy openly disfavors lab-only optimization that ignores integration, and it disfavors a paper that is, at bottom, an incremental case study. So the revision bar is real quantitative work that connects your result to an energy system, documented precisely, returned on time. Reviewers judge whether your rebuttal moved the systems-level and economic case, not whether it sounds polite.

Where Energy sits in the Elsevier energy stack

Knowing the neighbors tells you what a reviewer means when they ask for "more":

• Against Applied Energy: that journal wants technology and engineering for a specific application, while Energy wants the system-level analysis that ties technical depth to economic reality. A paper desk-rejected at Energy for being "too applied" can fit Applied Energy.
• Against Energy Policy: that journal wants the policy, regulatory, and social-science argument, while Energy stays on the engineering and systems-science side. A manuscript whose contribution is really a policy recommendation belongs there, not here.
• Against Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews: that journal wants a comprehensive review, while Energy wants original system-level research.

At Energy, "more" almost always means a deeper system-level or techno-economic argument, not a longer results section.

In our pre-submission review work with Energy submissions, the rebuttals that stall in a second revision round share a small set of recurring weaknesses. Each is a specific, named failure pattern in the Energy editorial culture, and each maps to the journal's two hard questions about the systems advance and the techno-economic case. These are the same patterns Energy reviewers consistently flag at re-review, and each weakness below is testable against your own draft response before you upload it.

Answering an energy-systems-advance request with more simulation cases. The most common and most expensive pattern in our Energy pre-submission reviews is a rebuttal that responds to "what is the system-level advance?" by adding a new scenario. We find that running the same methodology on a new city, load profile, or feedstock does not change the decision, because Energy editors consistently ask what the result advances at the system level, not how many cases support it.

Across our Energy rebuttal reviews, this mismatch between a generality question and a fourth case study is the single strongest predictor of a third round. The fix is a generalized formulation plus a sensitivity analysis that shows the advance holds across a parameter range, framed explicitly as a system-level claim.

Missing the techno-economic analysis the reviewer requested. When an Energy reviewer asks for cost or deployment feasibility, a rebuttal that answers with "costs are expected to be competitive" reads as a dodge. In our Energy pre-submission reviews, responses that promise economic relevance in the Discussion but never add a levelized-cost number, a capital-and-operating breakdown, or a benchmark against the conventional baseline draw a re-review comment asking for the analysis again.

That adds a round. The reviewer wants a number and a comparison, in a new table, with the methods cited by page and line.

A revision that stays an incremental case study. Energy disfavors a paper that is, after revision, still a single application of a known method with no general lesson. In our pre-submission review work with Energy manuscripts, the rebuttals we flag hardest expand the results and tidy the figures but leave the contribution exactly where it was, with no closed mass and energy balance, no system-integration analysis, and no claim that generalizes beyond the one case.

The same paper, reframed around the energy-systems advance with the statistical analysis or sensitivity study that supports generality, reads as original research rather than a worked example.

Generic acknowledgment without a page or line number, or inconsistent answers across reviewers. A rebuttal that says "we have revised the manuscript accordingly" forces the reviewer to hunt for the change in a long revised file. Because both reviewers read the whole letter, a methods or sample-handling concern raised by two referees and answered two different ways reads as evasive.

In our Energy pre-submission reviews we routinely find an energy-balance or benchmark point raised by both referees and reconciled by neither. Give every reply the page and line number of the revised file, and reconcile every overlapping comment to one consistent answer.

Run the systems-level analysis, document the techno-economics, locate every change, and reconcile across reviewers. That four-part discipline is what separates an Energy rebuttal that clears one revision round from one that stalls into a second or third. Check your Energy point-by-point response for these patterns before you submit.

Source: Manusights pre-submission reviews of Energy-targeted resubmissions, 2025 cohort.

Authors consistently underestimate the new-analysis effort and overestimate the writing effort. This breakdown is about workload, not the journal's decision clock; for the end-to-end decision schedule, see the Energy review time guide.

Source: Manusights pre-submission reviews of Energy resubmissions, 2025 cohort, last updated June 7, 2026.

A major-revision invitation at Energy is not a soft acceptance. The revised manuscript and your point-by-point response go back to the original reviewers, and the paper can still end in rejection after re-review if the revised version is still an incremental case study or the system-level questions are unresolved.

SciRev rates the handling process 3.1 of 5.0 and reports immediate rejections within about 10 days, so the journal is willing to say no at every stage and does not rubber-stamp revisions. Most rejections on revision here trace to one cause: the author answered an energy-systems-advance request with more simulation cases. The second most common is a requested techno-economic analysis that never arrived as a number.

Think twice before you resubmit if any of these are true:

• The response answers "what is the system-level advance?" with a new scenario instead of a generalized result.
• A reviewer asked for a levelized-cost or deployment analysis and you answered with a sentence in the Discussion.
• The energy balance still does not close.
• The same comment from both reviewers got two different answers.
• The rebuttal uses generic "we have addressed this" language with no page or line numbers.

Fixing these before resubmission is what keeps a major revision from turning into a rejection on revision.