Try Wonders for freeHow the literature is organised
There is no single renewable energy literature. A title search returns at least four, and they cite each other little.
The systems and policy literature looks at the whole transition. Turner (1999), "A Realizable Renewable Energy Future", argued in Science that renewable resources could provide all of society's energy needs, using the United States as the worked example and addressing energy payback, carbon dioxide abatement and storage. Gielen et al. (2019) find that renewables can supply two-thirds of total global energy demand by 2050 and contribute the bulk of the emission reductions needed to stay below 2 °C, but only with a six-fold acceleration of renewables growth and new technology for transport and manufacturing, which they say the international debate largely ignores. Dinçer (2000), Panwar, Kaushik and Kothari (2011), Ellabban, Abu-Rub and Blaabjerg (2014) and Owusu and Asumadu-Sarkodie (2016) are general reviews that students cite for background.
The engineering literature deals with integration. Carrasco et al. (2006) surveyed power-electronic systems for connecting wind and photovoltaic generators to the grid, including the storage technologies used alongside them. Kempton and Tomić (2005) proposed using electric vehicles to stabilise the grid and support large-scale renewables, and Khalid (2024) brings the same question up to date for smart grids.
The social science literature starts with Wüstenhagen, Wolsink and Bürer (2007), who introduced social acceptance of renewable energy innovation as a concept. Decision science contributes multi-criteria methods (Kumar et al., 2017). The economics literature relates renewable energy consumption to growth and emissions.
Main debates
Can renewables replace fossil fuels fast enough? Holechek et al. (2022) put fossil fuels at 83% of global energy consumption in 2020 against 12.6% for renewables, and calculate that zero fossil fuel use by 2050 would need renewable production to rise six-fold at constant demand, or eight-fold if demand grows 50%. Their conclusion is conditional: possible, but only with all eight of their pathways applied aggressively and major lifestyle changes in developed countries. Osman et al. (2023) supply the cost side, and it has moved fast — solar photovoltaic energy from $0.417 to $0.048 per kilowatt-hour between 2010 and 2021, with declines of 68% for onshore wind and 60% for offshore.
The second debate is about the environmental footprint of renewables themselves. Rahman, Farrok and Haque (2022) compare the impacts of solar, wind, hydroelectric, biomass, geothermal, tidal, ocean and osmotic plants. Osman et al. (2023) rank hydroelectric power plants as the most damaging to the environment among those they reviewed and wind turbines and biomass plants as the least. The third concerns whether the resource itself is stable: Gernaat et al. (2021) model climate change impacts on renewable supply, and Osman et al. report that wind and hydropower production could fall by as much as 40% in some regions, with solar the least affected.
Where recent work is heading
Storage and flexibility dominate the recent reviews: stationary storage for grid integration (Kebede et al., 2022, who match technologies to applications and conclude that hybrid combinations are often the viable answer), storage for smart grids (Tan et al., 2021), supercapacitors (Dissanayake and Kularatna-Abeywardana, 2024) and green hydrogen (Oliveira, Beswick and Yan, 2021). Other themes are cost and resilience under a changing climate (Osman et al., 2023), climate impacts on supply (Gernaat et al., 2021), forecasting with deep learning (Aslam et al., 2021), green finance (Rasoulinezhad and Taghizadeh-Hesary, 2022) and broad technology surveys (Ang et al., 2022; Al-Shetwi, 2022).