Promoting Energy Performance Contracting for Achieving Urban Sustainability: What is the Research Trend?

Zhang Zhang,Yuan Yuan

doi:10.3390/en12081443

Abstract

The increasing demand for applying energy performance contracting (EPC) for urban energy conservation has resulted in a significant amount of publications over the past decade. This study tries to identify future research trends in the subject of EPC through analyzing 127 journal papers published from 2008 to 2018. Based on the analysis and discussion of the EPC research, several main research trends were identified. The research results reveal an increasing research interest in EPC over the period. The findings imply that case study is the major research method and descriptive analysis and statistical analysis are primarily used for data analysis. In addition, EPC research in the past decade focused on five major research topics, which are ‘implementation of EPC projects’, ‘EPC mechanism and business models’, ‘decision-making in EPC projects’, ‘Energy Service Companies (ESCOs) in EPC projects’, and ‘risk management in EPC projects’. Based on the five research topics, future research trends and directions in EPC were identified as well. The findings of this study can be informative and valuable for guiding future research in EPC, and are particularly helpful for researchers who are keen to open a new window of investigating EPC issues worldwide.

Highlights

Energy performance contracting (EPC) has been commonly regarded as a critical and valuable energy conservation mechanism in urban development, under which an energy service company (ESCO) provides an energy-saving service to the energy user (EU) and shares the energy cost-savings with EUs together [1,2,3,4]
Major practitioners’ behavior in energy performance contracting (EPC) projects, two-party game, three-party game, and optimal decision-making in EPC projects
The first strtegy is that we identified future research trends based on evaluation of the annual number of papers on different research topics, because we believe this implies whether the topic receives continuous attention from global researchers, and topics attracting significant research attention can be potentially important in the future

Summary

Introduction

Energy performance contracting (EPC) has been commonly regarded as a critical and valuable energy conservation mechanism in urban development, under which an energy service company (ESCO) provides an energy-saving service to the energy user (EU) and shares the energy cost-savings with EUs together [1,2,3,4]. With a major initiative being energy conservation, a lot of EPC-related studies have been published in scholarly journals due to the perceived benefits of effectively promoting energy efficiency [3,7,8,9,10]. While these studies contribute significantly to the knowledge of energy management, they present a challenge for scholars to grasp an overview of EPC research. It is of vital importance to systematically investigate the EPC-related literature, which would be helpful in inspiring and guiding future research trends on the subject

Methods

Results

Conclusion