Research hotspots and development trends of virtual power plant in the energy transition: A bibliometric analysis

As an emerging power system operation mode, virtual power plant has shown great potential in improving energy efficiency, enhancing grid stability, and promoting the integration of distributed energy resources. In order to gain a comprehensive insight into the research trends and development trends in the field of virtual power plant, a systematic bibliometric analysis was conducted on 1314 articles included in the WoS database from 2010 to 2024, covering research fields, published journals, core authors, major countries/regions and research institutions, and high-frequency keywords. The analysis shows that China’s research achievements in this field are abundant, accounting for more than 40 % of the published papers, among which North China Electric Power University is the research institution with the most published papers, and Zhongfu Tan and Liwei Ju from the university have conducted in-depth and extensive research. Energies and Applied Energy are the two journals with the largest number of publications. In addition, virtual power plant as energy fuels, power electronics technology and green manufacturing and other interdisciplinary research topics include not only mainstream research topics such as energy aggregation, demand response and power market, but also emerging technologies such as smart grids, electric vehicles and blockchain. At the same time, it also makes a detailed analysis of the national policy development, Research network expansion and excellent case reference of virtual power plant industry, which provides reference value for other countries.