Worldwide research trends on hydropower

Abstract

Hydropower is the energy generated by transforming the force of water into electrical energy. To take advantage of this power, large hydraulic infrastructures are built that are suitable for extracting the maximum potential from this renewable, emission-free, and domestic resource. The goal of this chapter is to have an overview of the worldwide research trends related to hydropower. All publications indexed in the Scopus database with this term in the title, abstract, or keywords are studied, obtaining more than 23, 000 records. The subject categories have been analyzed, and the most important ones were: Engineering, Environmental Science, Energy, and Earth and Planetary Sciences. With regard to the temporal evolution of the number of publications, two periods have been detected, up to the year 2000 and after that; the latter period has an exponential growth. In terms of countries, it has been observed that this ranking is led by China, the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, India, and Brazil. The main institutions with at least 200 publications were 15, all from China except one from Norway. Study of the keywords made it possible to detect nine clusters that were considered significant and that establish the research trends in this field: Small Hydropower, Energy Optimization, Rock Mechanics, Dams & Reservoir, Engineering, Fish, Hydrology, Simulation, and Agriculture. In short, this book chapter provides a global overview and new research opportunities in the field of hydropower.