Taxonomy based trend discovery of renewable energy technologies in desalination and power generation

Renewable energy (RE) technologies are increasingly viewed as critically important since the noticeable depletion of fossil fuel. Knowledge that facilitates forecasting the likely growth and consequences of emergent technologies is essential for well-informed technology management. Acquiring and analyzing such knowledge is hampered by the amount of data available in publications. In order to elucidate the advance of technologies, we want to address questions like: “How many scientific articles have been published in solar energy recently?” Intelligent search techniques capable of grouping semantically similar concepts are therefore needed, such that e.g. the term ”parabolic trough” is subsumed under solar energy related technologies and hence articles about it should be included in the analysis. The novelty of this work is the deployment of a large, high quality RE-taxonomy for comprehensive trend discovery in publications and patents. We report interesting trends of renewables in two case studies: power generation and desalination techniques. While all major renewables — except geothermal-recently boomed in power generation in terms of publication volume, leading to a nearly equibalanced diversification, patents only reflect strong growth for wind and solar. Renewables in desalination, in particular reverse osmosis, are mainly solar and wind with a slight upward trend of biofuels in publications, hereas other renewables are still in experimental stage.