The integration of digital technologies into renewable energy systems is rapidly transforming the landscape of power generation, offering new pathways for enhancing efficiency, sustainability and scalability. This paper aims to examine the evolving role of digitalization in the development of renewable energy.
The study employs a comprehensive two-phase methodology, comprising machine-based pattern recognition and human-based interpretation phases. In the initial phase of the study, the Web of Science database was queried to identify relevant literature published between 2000 and 2023. This search yielded a dataset of over 20,000 articles. The findings were employed to analyze the thematic structures and technological trajectories. Novel text-mining techniques were employed, including SciBERT-based topic modeling, dimensionality reduction and K-means clustering.
The findings highlight broad patterns in the way digital technologies are incorporated into renewable energy research and point to emerging areas of interest across the field. The analysis identifies ten clusters that map the intersections between digital transformation and renewable energy across different domains. These domains span production- to service-oriented activities on one axis and digital devices to intelligent computational methods on the other. The results provide a structured overview of how research themes are distributed and suggest possible directions for future technological development and stakeholder engagement.
The analysis is based on titles, abstracts and keywords, which capture thematic patterns but not the full methodological depth of individual studies. In addition, the dataset is drawn exclusively from the Web of Science database, which may exclude relevant publications indexed elsewhere.
This paper offers a systematic methodological framework for mapping technology evolution in the context of renewable energy digitalization and provides a structured interpretation of how digital tools appear across different research domains. The study contributes to the growing body of work at the intersection of digital innovation and sustainable energy by presenting a large-scale, evidence-based overview of current research trends and their potential implications for future development pathways.
