Energy communities: Insights from scientific publications
Energy communities: Insights from scientific publications

Summary/Abstract: Research background: Over the last ten years, a substantial amount of scholarly research hasdelved into energy communities (ECs) from diverse viewpoints. These ECs are extremelyimportant in setting the pathway to a clean energy transition.Purpose of the article: Our objective is to glean valuable insights from publications indexed inthe Web of Science (WoS) database to deepen our comprehension of ECs and their academicdiscourse.Methods: Data analytics, factorial analysis, and more complex natural language processing(NLP) techniques such as latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) are implemented to extract valuableinsights from over 1000 WoS publications relevant in the EC field. The primary contribution ofthis study lies in furnishing details regarding the key contributors to the EC scholarly land-scape, including authors, their affiliations, universities, and countries of origin. Additionally,we aim to elucidate the prevalent keywords and thematic approaches employed in their re-search endeavors.Findings & value added: Considering the extracted dataset, an annual growth rate of 21.15%has been recorded, highlighting the research community’s interest in the field of ECs. Fur-thermore, three topics are optimally obtained. Overall, a coherence score of 0.44 suggests thatthe LDA model performs adequately in terms of topic interpretation. Topic 1 relates to com-munity-based energy initiatives. Topic 2, featuring terms like “grid,” “study” and “EU”alongside “energy” and “community,” suggests a focus on energy systems. Topic 3 includesterms such as “generation,” “analysis” and “consumption,” indicating a topic that is centeredaround the technical or analytical aspects of energy production and usage. This study under-scores how the alignment between state laws and EU directives in supporting ECs can serveas a model for other regions. The findings suggest that similar policy frameworks could beeffectively adapted to different national contexts, providing valuable insights for countrieslooking to enhance their renewable energy strategies.

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