Green Practices: A Solution for Environmental Deregulation and the Future of Energy Efficiency in the Post-COVID-19 Era

The world has paid increasing attention to energy efficiency projects since the Paris agreement and UN climate summit. Recently, the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the process of the green energy transition, which has attracted considerable attention from economists, environmentalists, and international organizations and has led to significant research in energy. This study addresses the importance of green energy practices in the post-COVID-19 era to deal with environmental deregulation using bibliometric analysis. Data were extracted from the Scopus database from 2020 to 2022. Results indicate that China gained a prominent place in publishing topic-related articles. However, Italy stands at the top position in total and average article citations. Sustainability is the most productive journal, followed by Energies and the Journal of Cleaner Production. Nazarbayev University and the University of Cambridge are the most contributing research institutes. In general, the cooperation of authors, institutes, and countries strengthens research; however, collaboration at the author level across the nation was lower than in others. The study highlights three research streams and four themes by systematically conducting a bibliometric coupling and co-occurrence network that anticipates and significantly segregates literature. Bibliometric coupling identifies three research streams of sustainable green business strategies, green infrastructure requirements, and green solutions and opportunities from COVID-19. Furthermore, the co-occurrence network proposes four main themes related to green innovation in the epidemic era, security and sustainable development goals with green practices, public health protection and green finance, and investment and risk management. The results provide insights into current research in the field of energy and will assist future work promoting environmentally friendly projects.