Amidst urgent global calls for sustainable energy transition, China has made significant progress in developing the photovoltaic (PV) sector, but it is also accompanied by technical bottlenecks. Therefore, understanding the evolution and driving mechanisms of China's PV collaborative innovation network is of great significance, as it determines the acceleration of developing a cleaner energy system. By employing social network analysis and the temporal exponential random graph model, this study finds that the correlation strength of China's PV collaborative innovation networks has been enhanced from 2001 to 2023. The network has evolved from a dual-core-driven model to a multipolar collaborative model and has formed an association pattern centered around the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, Yangtze River Delta, and Pearl River Delta regions, exhibiting a small-world phenomenon and core-periphery structure. The evolution process of China's PV collaborative innovation network shows significant endogenous structural dependencies. This is mainly reflected in the popularity of unidirectional relationships, the development of bidirectional reciprocal relationships, and the closure of triadic relationships. The network shows path dependence. Provincial economic capacity, electricity demand, human capital, and research and development investment exhibit significant actor relationship effects. In contrast, environmental pollution only shows a sender effect. Furthermore, economic zone and geographical distance are also key formation factors for China's PV collaborative innovation network.
Wang et al. (2026) studied this question.