Towards EnergyGPT: A Large Language Model Specialized for the Energy Sector

Large language models have demonstrated impressive capabilities across various domains. However, their general-purpose nature often limits their effectiveness in specialized fields such as energy, where deep technical expertise and precise domain knowledge are essential. In this paper, we introduce EnergyGPT, a domain-specialized language model tailored for the energy sector, developed by fine-tuning the LLaMA 3.1-8B model on a high-quality, curated corpus of energy-related texts. We consider two adaptation strategies: a full-parameter Supervised Fine-Tuning variant and a parameter-efficient LoRA-based variant that updates only a small fraction of the model parameters. We present a complete development pipeline, including data collection and curation, model fine-tuning, benchmark design and LLM-judge choice, evaluation, and deployment. Through this work, we demonstrate that our training strategy enables improvements in domain relevance and performance without the need for large-scale infrastructure. By evaluating the performance of both EnergyGPT variants using domain-specific question-answering benchmarks, our results show that the adapted models consistently outperform the base model in most energy-related language understanding and generation tasks, with the LoRA variant achieving competitive gains at significantly reduced training cost.