ABSTRACT Although investments in renewable energy, particularly solar photovoltaic (PV) systems, have increased over the past decade, the energy transition still faces dilemmas related to several socio‐technical and environmental aspects. To clarify the benefits, challenges, and trade‐offs of distributed urban solar PV, this article conducts a multidimensional literature review and develops an integrated trade‐off framework that considers technical, economic, social, regulatory, and environmental perspectives. The review highlights the controversial aspects that support and challenge the potential of on‐grid urban solar systems to enhance energy security, improve efficiency, and support community engagement through technological innovation and novel social practices. Several concerns arise, including investment risks, social equity, energy security, environmental impact, maintenance, and aesthetics, all of which require strategic mitigation. Integrating solar PV into smart urban environments also presents constraints related to energy storage, consumer adaptability, business model innovation (BMI), stakeholder engagement, and potential health hazards. Addressing these issues requires balancing socio‐technical and environmental aspects. Based on a systematic assessment of European case studies—including Amsterdam's solar‐EV ecosystem, Spain's post‐2018 regulatory reforms, and France's inclusive financing models—we find that successful pathways combine modernized interconnection standards, streamlined permitting, collective self‐consumption frameworks, performance‐based regulation, and targeted financial instruments for low‐income households. BMI and policy reforms are essential drivers for the successful diffusion of solar PV systems. Achieving a sustainable energy future in urban areas requires stakeholder collaboration, public‐private partnerships (PPPs), innovative solutions, and careful balancing of multiple trade‐offs. This article sheds light on the current state of the art on distributed solar PV and emphasizes the need for informed decision‐making to address the complexities of on‐grid urban solar systems, aiming for a sustainable, resilient, efficient, and inclusive urban energy future.
ABSTRACT Parabolic trough solar collectors (PTSCs) can play a crucial role in providing industrial process heat (IPH) by harnessing solar energy efficiently. To contribute to this domain, this review maps the global industrial footprint of PTSC‐based IPH installations. It identifies possible integration strategies (preheating, steam generation, and process heating) along with practical constraints (space availability, data scarcity, etc.). The review shows that system‐level design choices, such as thermal energy storage and operational flexibility, often govern achievable solar fraction and economic competitiveness more than collector performance alone. Additionally, several studies on the optimization of PTSCs for industrial use are presented and analyzed. It reveals a clear shift from single‐parameter tuning toward AI‐assisted and multiobjective paradigms that simultaneously address thermal performance, cost metrics, and operational reliability. Further, literature on dynamic modeling of the PTSC and its control is examined. It highlights the necessity of maintaining stable operations amid fluctuating solar input and varying industrial load conditions. Overall, the review distils convergent trends, highlights persistent gaps, and outlines actionable research directions to accelerate robust PTSC deployment for industrial decarbonization. This article is categorized under: Sustainable Energy > Solar Energy Sustainable Development > Goals Sustainable Energy > Energy Efficiency
ABSTRACT This study conducts a comprehensive bibliometric analysis combined with text mining to explore the influence of clean cooking fuel on women's empowerment. Here, we have analyzed 305 research publications indexed in the Web of Science to explore trends in research on clean cooking fuels, shedding light on their intersection with gender dynamics, health, and socio‐economic development. The bibliometric analysis showed a significant growth in terms of published papers from 2015 onwards, influenced by global attention to clean energy and its socio‐environmental benefits. We identified six common topics through topic modeling, including the health benefits of clean cooking technologies for women, reduced indoor air pollution, and the socio‐economic advantage of cleaner fuels. The results underscore the critical role of clean cooking fuels in enhancing women's health, reducing their domestic labor burden, and advancing gender equality. Geographical disparities in how impactful research is highlighted; the USA and China lead for citations. Despite such progress, challenges such as economic and cultural barriers to adoption in rural populations remain, necessitating targeted policy action. Although previous literature had focused on clean energy transitions, this study contributes by demonstrating the potential benefits of clean cooking programs on women's empowerment and general well‐being. This article is categorized under: Human and Social Dimensions > Gender Equity Sustainable Development > Goals Policy and Economics > Research and Development
ABSTRACT Building‐integrated photovoltaics (BIPV) are emerging as a strategic interface technology linking building decarbonization and urban climate resilience, with research rapidly shifting from device‐level efficiency enhancement to system integration and urban‐scale deployment. Yet, coherent frameworks linking devices, components, buildings, and cities remain limited. This study presents a structured scientometric analysis of 2525 core publications (2003–2024), integrating co‐occurrence mapping, co‐citation clustering, temporal evolution modeling, and burst detection to map the field's structural evolution and thematic frontiers. Findings reveal three developmental phases: an initial focus on prototyping and grid integration; a subsequent shift toward multi‐physics modeling and building‐level simulation; and a recent expansion into high‐performance material integration, AI‐driven operation, carbon analytics, and urban deployment modeling. Global collaboration networks show growing multipolarity, with research output shaped by policy incentives. China leads in productivity and centrality, while emerging markets gain prominence. Institutional pathways diverge between materials–systems and architectural integration, and journals increasingly support interdisciplinary knowledge exchange across these domains. The evolution of BIPV is fundamentally driven by the cross‐scale transmission of performance criteria and boundary conditions, transforming technical metrics into deployable, verifiable strategies. Future research should prioritize engineering‐oriented evaluation of multifunctional materials for building applications, intelligent control systems that incorporate degradation and uncertainty, co‐optimization frameworks for thermal and visual comfort at façade boundaries, and urban deployment models that integrate semantic accuracy, hosting capacity, and grid‐integration costs. This study reconstructs BIPV's multi‐scalar knowledge landscape and proposes a capability framework for scalable and auditable deployment, offering strategic alignment across policy, practice, and scholarly agendas. This article is categorized under: Sustainable Energy > Solar Energy Cities and Transportation > Buildings Energy and Power Systems > Distributed Generation
ABSTRACT Increasing penetrations of variable renewable energy sources like wind and solar photovoltaic (PV) systems are challenging power system stability worldwide. Leveraging demand‐side behavior is becoming more popular to help overcome contemporary issues concerning balancing electricity generation and demand. As significant energy users with the potential to act as electricity producers through renewable energy sources, buildings are attractive assets for contributing to power system control from energy efficiency and demand response perspectives. Meanwhile, the proliferation of “smarter” buildings equipped with network‐connected sensors and devices using Internet of Things (IoT) platforms produces significant data volumes that lend themselves to novel artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) methods that we can apply across the suite of demand response design steps. This paper reviews the application of AI and ML methods across these steps, which include building energy analysis and auditing, modeling and predicting building load demand, detecting and classifying building energy and power flexibility, implementing flexible building load control, and participating in demand response and other ancillary service markets. Throughout the paper, we comprehensively analyze the application of various AI and ML methods, highlighting their effectiveness and limitations. We also identify emerging pertinent challenges of interest to practitioners and researchers examining the implementation of such approaches for building demand response provision. This article is categorized under: Cities and Transportation > Buildings Energy and Power Systems > Energy Infrastructure Energy and Power Systems > Energy Management
