Research Hotspots and Evolution of Energy Prosumer: A Literature Review and Bibliometric Analysis

Energy prosumer participates in the balance of the energy system actively through their production and consumption of energy and will become a major participant in the open energy market increasingly in the future. This paper used the bibliometric method to sort out 1251 literature data related to energy prosumer in the "Web of Science Core Collection" and used the software named CiteSpace to perform statistics and cooccurrence analysis. The research found the following: (a) journals in the field of prosumer have their emphasis on theory, application, policy, and modeling; (b) the United States and European institutions have published the articles most, and the academic influence of Chinese scholars needs to be further improved; (c) the focus of the prosumers' research in the past decade has turned the energy system designing to the market transaction research; (d) P2P, P2G, and prosumer community are three market models that have attracted attention for scholars; besides, self-consumption, market matching, district heating, aggregators, and household energy management systems are also the current research hotspots; (e) digital technologies such as big data, the Internet of Things, and blockchain have a significant impact on the prosumer participating in energy market transactions, which will change the existing energy supply chain model profoundly. In the context of the energy Internet, energy trading platforms, digital ecosystems, cross-border innovation, and other fields will become the hotspots in future research on prosumer.