Forecasting Renewable Energy Technologies in Desalination and Power Generation Using Taxonomies

Abstract

Renewable Energy (RE) technologies are increasingly viewed as crucially important. Knowledge that helps to predict the likely growth of emergent technologies is essential for well-informed technology management. The vast amount of available data in publications hinders the acquisition and analysis of this knowledge. Therefore, there is a need for intelligent search techniques capable of grouping semantically similar concepts together, such that, for example, terms containing “photovoltaic” are hierarchically subsumed under solar energy-related technologies. Consequently, articles related to “Photovoltaics” should be included in the analysis. To accommodate this in an automated fashion, the authors deploy a renewable energy taxonomy for comprehensive trend discovery in publications and patents. This taxonomy is based on the hierarchical structure of Wikipedia categories and their subordinate Wikipedia terms. This paper analyzes promising trends of renewable energy sources in two case studies: power generation and desalination techniques.

A Unified Approach for Taxonomy-Based Technology Forecasting

“…This is evidenced by a body of 105 publications with average publication year 2007. The findings for Biodiesel are consistent with earlier results reported in (Dawelbait et al, 2010) even though a different corpus and a different keyword set was used. The taxonomy created with frequent keywords (Supplementary material S1) unravels that "Removal experiments" have been mentioned in 272 documents with an average date of 2007.…”

“…The framework outline above provides a decision maker with an eagle eye perspective over a research landscape. Previously, we studied trends in Renewable Energy Desalination and Power Generation (Dawelbait et al, 2010). To further focus our efforts, the examples presented in this chapter will be centered on the research landscape of a particular RE subfields, amongst them biofuel and Waste-to-energy (W2E).…”

“…As a consequence, it can be seen that "Solar thermal power" experienced a revival in recent years after being a hot topic in the early 80's (coinciding with the oil crisis of 1979) followed by a decrease of activity during the mid-80's until the mid-90's. For instance see (Dawelbait et al, 2010). The concept of technology revival or other turbulences is generally not reflected by trend discovery techniques such as the Fisher-Pry model and Gompertz (S-shaped) curves.…”

Text mining analysis of wind turbine accidents: An ontology-based framework

“…In [10], a large taxonomy for renewable energy is developed for comprehensive trend discovery, based on the scientific articles. The study in [11] conducts patent analysis using text mining techniques to explore patterns of innovation and evolution of energy technologies and compares their innovation characteristics.…”

“…Many of the existing works applying text mining to the renewable energy industry focus on identification of technology trends [10][11] [12]. In [10], a large taxonomy for renewable energy is developed for comprehensive trend discovery, based on the scientific articles.…”