Renewable Energy Predictions: Worldwide Research Trends and Future Perspective

Abstract

The objective of this chapter is to have a global perspective of the research related to renewable energy predictions and thus determine the worldwide research trends in this field. For this purpose, all the publications indexed in the Scopus database with these terms in the title, abstract or keywords were studied, obtaining more than 10,000 records. The subject categories were analyzed, and the most important ones were engineering and energy. Regarding the trend in the number of publications, two periods have been detected, from 1996 to 2007 and from 2008 to the present with a growing interest. Regarding countries, it has been observed that this ranking is led by the United States, followed by China, and in third place by the United Kingdom. The main institutions with more than 100 publications were: North China Electric Power University (China), National Renewable Energy Laboratory (USA), Ministry of Education (China), Technical University of Denmark (Denmark), and Tsinghua University (China). The study of key words made it possible to detect the main clusters that have been considered significant and are the ones that set the research trends in this field. Three clearly differentiated clusters have been found. The first one focused on the search for alternative renewable energies, in its beginnings mainly with the use of biomass. The second one is more focused on electric power transmission network, and the third one is focused on wind energy and its forecasting, where modern computational and mathematical techniques are being used.