Monitoring scientific collaboration trends in wind energy components

This report presents a bibliometric analysis of scientific articles issued on blades and on offshore wind support structures. It uses the JRC-developed TIM software for data analysis and visualisation, drawing on text mining and network analysis to count publication activity levels and identify collaboration patterns between entities. Our bibliometric searches detected increasing densification in the co-publication networks mapped by TIM for blades and on offshore support structures. This indicated that scientific publication activity could be intensifying, and this was confirmed by experts and by literature on wind energy. Both provided evidence of growth in these two research fields, and of intensified collaboration among partners – following the wind-energy industry orientation towards larger blade designs and innovative offshore support structures. The recent EC Communication on a renewed European Agenda for Research and Innovation points out that Europe is relatively strong in adding or sustaining value for existing products, services and processes, known as incremental innovation. But Europe needs to do better at generating disruptive and breakthrough innovations. Thus, the agenda encourages cooperation between research teams across countries and disciplines, supporting them to make breakthrough discoveries. Also countries outside the EU have put policies in place (e.g. China's 12th Five Year Plan) explicitly focussing on technology innovation in the sector of onshore and offshore wind. Within this context, this analysis uses the JRC's Tools for Innovation Monitoring (TIM) software developed by the JRC to retrieve bibliometric data on blades (a component more benefitting from incremental innovations) and offshore wind support structures (a relatively new research field in which disruptive innovations like floating power plants might become breakthrough innovations) to - measure the publication and collaboration activity, - identify leading organisations and new entrants, - identify the main areas of publications of the leading players and - identify the leading countries and country collaboration patterns. The bibliometric results obtained are then contrasted with data for research funding on wind energy from the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation programme, to analyse the thematic focus of publication and funding activity. Results are also complemented with recent information from the wind industry and research news on the latest developments in the investigated areas. Thus, this study can support policies aiming for prioritisation and alignment of European research efforts within the wind energy topic.JRC.C.7-Knowledge for the Energy Unio

Workshop on identification of future emerging technologies in the ocean energy sector

As part of the Commission's internal Low Carbon Energy Observatory (LCEO) project, the Joint Research Centre (JRC) is developing an inventory of Future Emerging Technologies (FET) relevant to energy supply. A key part of the LCEO initiative is the consultation of external experts, addressing both those with in-depth experience in specific fields and those with a broad perspective on relevant science and engineering aspects. In this context, on March 27, 2018 the JRC organised a Workshop on Identification of Future Emerging Technologies for Ocean Enery, on it premises in Ispra. The workshop was organized on the idea of a colloquium between international experts to discuss about future emerging technologies considering different aspects such as their technology readiness level (TRL) , the potential advantages and challenges affecting their development, and evaluating the possible speed of development . A number of different technological solutions were discussed, identified directly by the invited experts on the condition that they respected the following criteria: • To be a technology for energy supply/conversion in the field of ocean energy. • To be a radically new technology/concept, not achievable by incremental research on mainstream technologies (this should match the concept of the Future Emerging Technology in the Horizon 2020 work program http://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020/en/h2020-section/future-and-emerging-technologies). • To be in an early stage of development: their Technology Readiness Level should not be more than 3. Questionnaires were sent to experts for the identification of ocean energy FETs. The templates can be found in Appendix B. The structure of the workshop was builtupon the inputs received from the experts and on in-house analysis undertaken by the JRC. The aim of this document is to gather, organize and highlight all the knowledge and information, provided by the external and internal experts, which were discussed during the workshop.JRC.C.7-Knowledge for the Energy Unio

A bibliometric-based technique to identify emerging photovoltaic technologies in a comparative assessment with expert review

This paper compares the results of technology mapping from bibliometric analysis and results from expert review to identify emerging solar photovoltaic (PV) technologies. The bibliometric analysis is based on “Tools for Innovation Monitoring” (TIM), a new software code developed by the Joint Research Centre. With this text-mining software a set of relevant keywords is extracted through frequency analysis from a corpus of pertinent scientific publications. Keywords obtained by quantitative analysis by TIM are tested against results from qualitative cognitive analysis by an international panel of PV technology experts by means of a set of proposed indicators. The technologies identified by the PV experts are well represented amongst the most frequently occurring (highest ranked) keywords retrieved by TIM. The more salient keywords tend to correspond to the relatively more established technologies such as dye sensitised solar cells, organic PV and more recently-developed technologies such as perovskites. These high rated/developed keywords/technologies can be relatively straightforwardly detected through bibliometric analysis. Contrary to that, keywords designating the most emerging technologies like ferroelectric PV, hot carriers and multiple exciton generation solar cells tend to occur much less frequently and therefore provide weaker signals. These weak signals can be important in foresight.JRC.C.4-Sustainable Transpor

Bibliometric Network Densification Patterns for Three Renewable Energy Technologies

The aim of this paper is to explore and illustrate a possible use of densification, a metric derived from network theory, to shed light into the evolution of three renewable energy technologies. The combination of the statistical analysis of publications (bibliometrics) and network analysis allows monitoring technological developments and can be used for the identification of emerging topics. Renewable energy has been addressed by the European Commission and in bibliometric studies e.g. On offshore wind energy, Tsai et al. (2016) identified technology development priorities, and Gao et al. (2016) reviewed worldwide progress of wind power prices. On solar photovoltaics, thermodynamics fundamentally limit efficiency, and there is much research on alternative approaches to improving efficiency and/or production costs. Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS, providing energy from deep fractured rocks) is an emerging technology requiring significant development to reach commercial readiness, with innovation so far limited by costs, exploration risks and technological improvement needs. Kacham et al. (2012) provide insights into technological developments and emerging trends.JRC.C.7-Knowledge for the Energy Unio