Green Energy Markets and Sustainable Development: Opportunities and Challenges

Dear Colleagues,

The proposed Special Issue, entitled “Green Energy Markets and Sustainable Development: Opportunities and Challenges”, will provide a comprehensive platform for advancing interdisciplinary dialogue on and empirical understanding of how market-oriented mechanisms, technological innovation, and policy coordination can collectively drive the global transition toward sustainable energy systems.

(1) Focus, Scope, and Purpose

1. Focus: This Special Issue focuses on the evolving dynamics of green energy markets, including renewable generation, carbon trading, decentralized energy systems, and peer-to-peer electricity transactions, and their implications for sustainable development pathways. It will explore how economic incentives, digital infrastructures, and governance frameworks can be aligned to enhance the efficiency, equity, and resilience of low-carbon energy systems.
2. Scope: This Special Issue encompasses theoretical, empirical, and methodological contributions that bridge energy economics, environmental policy, and system engineering. Topics include but are not limited to market design for renewable integration, information asymmetry and behavioral economics in green markets, investment under uncertainty, lifecycle sustainability assessment of energy technologies, and the interaction between local and global energy markets in achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Its scope also extends to digital and data-driven innovations, such as blockchain-enabled trading, AI-based demand forecasting, and carbon footprint accounting tools, that reshape the operational and regulatory landscape of green energy markets.
3. Purpose: This Special Issue’s overarching purpose is to enable a multidimensional understanding of how market-based coordination can accelerate sustainable energy transitions while ensuring social inclusiveness, economic viability, and environmental integrity. By integrating perspectives from economics, policy science, data analytics, and environmental engineering, it seeks to generate actionable insights for policymakers, researchers, and industry practitioners.

(2) Relationship to Existing Literature and Contribution to Sustainability

Existing research on sustainability has traditionally treated energy systems through isolated lenses—technological optimization, environmental assessment, or economic efficiency. This Special Issue will transcend such fragmentation by situating green energy markets as a cross-cutting mechanism that connects technical feasibility with socio-economic transformation. It complements the literature as follows:

• Providing a systems-level synthesis that links market structures with sustainability outcomes such as carbon neutrality, energy equity, and resource circularity;
• Introducing new frameworks for quantifying and monitoring sustainability through data-driven metrics, multi-criteria optimization models, and life-cycle indicators;
• Evaluating policy and legal instruments, including carbon pricing, renewable portfolio standards, and green finance mechanisms, as enablers of sustainable market transformation;
• Highlighting the role of behavioral and institutional factors in shaping the performance and inclusivity of green energy markets.

By addressing sustainability from socio-economic, scientific, and integrated viewpoints, this Special Issue aligns closely with the aims and scope of Sustainability (MDPI). It not only defines and measures sustainability through energy market analysis but also operationalizes it, demonstrating how policy design, digital innovation, and market reform can jointly enhance the long-term resilience and justice of global energy transitions.

Prof. Dr. Qingshan Xu
Dr. Yuanxing Xia
Dr. Yang Li
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• green energy markets
• sustainable development
• renewable integration
• market design
• policy instruments
• information asymmetry
• digital sustainability tools
• carbon neutrality