The article examines approaches to the analysis of factors that influence the difference between capacity and current energy production in the country, that is, the gap in energy efficiency in the economy. To investigate the main trends in the theory of energy efficiency and energy conservation, a bibliometric analysis was carried out (using VOSViewer v.1.6.10 toolkit), the object of which was 1428 scientific articles in publications indexed by the Scopus scientometric database. The analysis showed that in 2019, scientists published 1.5 times more work on the subject than in 2005, and revealed five clusters of scientists who investigated the problems of the connection between institutional determinants and lack of electricity in the country