Decoding the Developmental Trajectory of the New Power System in China via Bibliometric and Visual Analysis

Abstract

Under the twin imperatives of climate change mitigation and sustainable development, achieving a low-carbon transformation of power systems has become a national priority. To clarify this objective, China issued the Blue Book on the Development of New Power System, which comprehensively defines the guiding concepts and characteristic features of a new power system. In this study, natural language processing-based keyword extraction techniques were applied to the document, employing both the TF-IDF and TextRank algorithms to identify its high-frequency terms as characteristic keywords. These keywords were then used as topic queries in the Web of Science Core Collection, yielding 1568 relevant publications. CiteSpace was employed to perform a bibliometric analysis of these records, extracting research hotspots in the new power system domain and tracing their evolutionary trajectories. The analysis revealed that “renewable energy” appeared 247 times as the core high-frequency term, while “energy storage” exhibited both high frequency and high centrality, acting as a bridge across multiple subfields. This pattern suggests that research in the new power system field has evolved from a foundation in renewable energy and storage toward smart grids, market mechanisms, carbon capture, and artificial intelligence applications. Taken together, these results indicate that early research was primarily grounded in renewable energy and storage technologies, which provided the technical basis for subsequent exploration of smart grids and market mechanisms. In the more recent stage, under the dual-carbon policy and digital intelligence imperatives, research hotspots have further expanded toward carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) and artificial intelligence applications. Looking ahead, interdisciplinary studies focusing on intelligent dispatch and low-carbon transition are poised to emerge as the next major research frontier.