About Power and Energy Future

Power and Energy Future

Overview and identity

Power and Energy Future, abbreviated PEF, is an international, peer-reviewed, open-access journal dedicated to advancing transformative research in energy systems engineering and interdisciplinary solutions for a sustainable energy future. It is published on the SciOpen platform of Tsinghua University Press, appears on the official Tsinghua University Press journal list with online ISSN 3105-3785, and reached Volume 1 in 2026, with its third issue appearing in September of that year. The journal's editorial office is at Northeast Electric Power University in Jilin City, Jilin Province, in north-eastern China — a university whose entire history is bound up with the electric power industry. Power and Energy Future is therefore an energy journal edited from inside one of China's specialist power universities, published internationally in English, and addressed to researchers working on how power and energy systems must change in the decades ahead.

Launch and publishing partners

The journal was launched under the auspices of Northeast Electric Power University and is co-published with Tsinghua University Press through SciOpen — described in its own aims statement as co-published with Tsinghua University SciOpen. That partnership mirrors a pattern used by several new Chinese English-language journals: a specialist host institution supplies the editorial community and subject expertise, while Tsinghua University Press supplies an established international platform, production systems and global reach. Articles in the journal carry the Tsinghua University Press imprint and are published as open access under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY), meaning anyone may read, share and reuse them with attribution. The journal's DOI registrations use the PEF prefix, in the form 10.26599/PEF, marking it as part of the Tsinghua University Press family of SciOpen titles.

Host institution: Northeast Electric Power University

Northeast Electric Power University (NEEPU) is a provincial public university in Jilin City, affiliated with Jilin Province. Founded in 1949 in Changchun, it grew out of the Changchun Electrical Machinery Advanced Professional School and is described by the university as the first electric power engineering school launched by the People's Republic of China. The school moved to Jilin City in 1955, became an undergraduate institute named Jilin Electric Power Institute in 1958, and was renamed the Northeast China Institute of Electric Power Engineering in 1978, when it stood under the Ministry of Electric Power. In December 2005, with the approval of the Ministry of Education, it became Northeast Dianli University, and in 2016 its English name was settled as Northeast Electric Power University. Today it has 14 schools and departments and around fifty undergraduate programmes across engineering, science, management, liberal arts, law, economics, education and arts, with electrical power as its defining feature, and a full-time student body of roughly nineteen to twenty-one thousand in recent institutional descriptions. Its research strengths include the Key Laboratory of Modern Power System Simulation and Control and Renewable Energy Technology of the Ministry of Education, whose staff appear among the journal's early authors — a direct link between the university's laboratories and the journal's pages.

Editorial leadership and office

Power and Energy Future is led by five editors-in-chief: Zhe Chen, Kahramon Allayev, Ying Zheng, Gangui Yan and Yi Wang — an unusually broad leadership group that signals the journal's international and interdisciplinary ambition across power engineering and energy systems. The editorial office is at No. 169 Changchun Road, Jilin City, Jilin, the university's address, and the office email uses the university's domain, at pef_editor@neepu.edu.cn. Professor Yang Li of Northeast Electric Power University serves as managing editor, handling general pre-submission queries about article types, indexing, timelines, publishing costs and the status of manuscripts, while Dr Haoran Li and Dr Shuxin Zhang serve as associate managing editors, dealing with accepted manuscripts in production and post-publication corrections. On the publisher's side, journal publishing queries are handled by Yao Meng at Tsinghua University Press. This named, contactable editorial structure — host-university editors for scholarly matters, a press contact for publishing matters — is characteristic of the SciOpen journal model.

Aims: the Paris Agreement and China's Dual Carbon strategy

The journal's aims statement frames its mission explicitly in policy terms. Power and Energy Future responds, it says, to the global challenges outlined in the Paris Agreement and to China's "Dual Carbon" strategy — the national commitment to peak carbon emissions and then reach carbon neutrality — by fostering innovation in low-carbon technologies, energy security and cross-disciplinary collaboration. That framing determines the kind of journal PEF sets out to be: not a narrow electrical-engineering title concerned only with components of the grid, but an energy-systems journal whose questions begin from decarbonisation and security and work down to the engineering. Its self-description stresses transformative research and interdisciplinary solutions for a sustainable energy future, language that invites contributions from engineering, computing, economics and policy wherever they bear on how energy is generated, transmitted, stored, traded and used.

Subject territory as shown by its early research

Because the journal is new, its published articles are the clearest guide to its territory in practice. Early research articles include a study of short-term wind power forecasting that considers meteorological spatio-temporal propagation and multi-factor coupling, tested on one hundred wind farms in western Inner Mongolia — work aimed at the operational problem that variable renewable generation poses for grid operators. Another early article proposes an electric heating load proxy power purchase forecasting strategy based on an ETP-EMD algorithm, using data from a typical electric heating load region in a north-eastern province across the 2022–2025 heating seasons and reporting daily-scale prediction accuracy of 85.11 percent — a distinctly regional energy problem, since electric heating is a major winter load in cold north-eastern China. A third studies ambient humidification-driven real-time passive cooling of solar cells using a hygroscopic hydrogel, addressing the efficiency losses photovoltaic panels suffer as they heat up. Together these papers map the journal's ground: forecasting and operation of renewable-heavy power systems, demand-side load research, and the performance of generation technologies themselves.

Load forecasting and the operation of future grids

One research theme is visible enough in the early volumes to single out: forecasting. A 2026 article by Yangze Zhou, Dalin Qin and Yi Wang, "How Shall We Evaluate Load Forecasts?", examines how load forecasts — which the authors note play a pivotal role in energy system management, supporting planning, operation and control — should themselves be judged. The presence of a methodological paper of this kind, alongside applied forecasting studies of wind power and heating load, indicates that the journal welcomes work on the analytical foundations of energy-system operation as well as on hardware. That is consistent with its energy-systems framing: in a grid with very high shares of wind and solar generation, the quality of forecasts of both supply and demand becomes a physical determinant of reliability and cost, and a journal of the energy future has reason to treat forecasting methods, evaluation standards and data-driven control as first-order research topics rather than supporting techniques.

Submission, peer review and publishing ethics

The journal's submission guidelines on SciOpen are detailed. Manuscripts are to be ordered as a cover letter, title page, abstract, keywords, main text including tables and figures, appendices where necessary, acknowledgements, a declaration of competing interest, references and author biographies, with graphical abstracts and electronic supplementary material where applicable. The cover letter must make a convincing statement of the novelty and significance of the work and its relevance to the aims and scope of Power and Energy Future, and must disclose any previous submission history where a manuscript has been rejected elsewhere. Changes to the author list between submission and revision require an explanatory statement, and changes of authorship or author order are not accepted after acceptance. The journal's publishing ethics pages state that it upholds a rigorous peer-review process and follows the principles and guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) for investigating suspected misconduct or fraud, and that it publishes only original content. These are the standard safeguards of a professionally run open-access journal, published openly on its platform pages.

Readership and significance

Power and Energy Future serves researchers and engineers working on power systems, renewable energy integration, energy storage, forecasting, electrified heating and cooling, and the wider transformation of energy systems, together with the policy and market researchers who study that transformation. Its significance lies in its position and timing. It gives Northeast Electric Power University — an institution created in 1949 to serve China's power industry, and still defined by that mission — an international English-language journal of its own at the moment when the power sector is undergoing its deepest change since electrification. Published from Jilin City by a specialist power university in partnership with Tsinghua University Press, peer-reviewed, open access under CC BY, and identified by online ISSN 3105-3785, the journal is a new but concretely established venue for research on the future of power and energy. Readers identifying the title should note its PEF abbreviation, its SciOpen home, and its editorial office at Northeast Electric Power University in Jilin, China.