Generating Future-Oriented Energy Policies and Technologies from the Multidisciplinary Group Discussions by Text-Mining-Based Identification of Topics and Experts

With increasing problems and challenging issues for sustainability under climate change, energy research has gained a lot of global attention from citizens, business and government on an important mission to make energy available in sustainable and clean ways. Moreover, as the bigger energy issues get, the more closely they are related to humans, so the multidisciplinary approach in energy research by integrating human sciences in energy domain has been called for and recognized to be of immense importance. However, so far most of the energy research has focused on one side such as economics and technology innovation. In addition, there have been limits to policymakers’ taking multidisciplinary perspectives for agenda-setting and policy-making on energy issues for future society under climate change. In this context, this paper proposes a systematic approach for agenda-setting and policy-making in future-oriented and multidisciplinary perspectives. In particular, it applies text-mining techniques to designing multidisciplinary group discussions and generates energy policies and technologies (EP&Ts) for the future society from the multidisciplinary perspectives. The proposed method was applied to South Korea. To sum up, the core energy-specific future trends in South Korea were identified and subsequently the top-priority future-oriented EP&Ts were generated for South Korea as follows: (i) real-time plan for electricity usage; (ii) purchase system, specialized for green energy products; (iii) cooperation association for sustainability; (iv) donating self-produced energy; (v) social media-based energy policy portal; and (vi) expert system designing the eco-friendly and low-energy indoor and outdoor designs. Thus, this paper has its novelty as the first trial that combines both qualitative and quantitative approaches for building up future-oriented strategies from the balanced and multidisciplinary perspectives. Eventually, it will help deal with bigger problems and grand challenges that our future energy society should overcome to sustain under climate change.