Study finds support for solar energy politically polarized
A new analysis of posts on social media finds public support for solar energy high, although this support decreased considerably from 2016 to 2022. The study also showed that solar power has become an increasingly polarized issue, whereby the shift in support is largely driven by opposition to solar energy in regions that Lean Republicine.
“The US saw a significant growth in the solar energy sector between 2013 and 2022, but that growth is not evenly spread throughout the country -some areas have seen more efforts of solar energy technologies than other areas,” says Serena Kim, corresponding author of the study and a university teacher of public administration. “We wanted to assess the attitude towards solar energy at both local and regional level, as well as how those attitudes have changed over time.
“These attitudes can influence the policy that has a significant impact on sustainable energy, and our findings suggest that attitudes are largely driven by politics,” says Kim.
For this study, the researchers collected more than 8 million messages regarding solar energy from the social media platform that is previously known as Twitter, for the years 2013-2022. These messages come from users who had included location data on their publicly focused accounts.
The researchers then used analytical tools to characterize the sentiment of each post as positive, negative or neutral in the direction of solar energy.
“We have found that a majority of people supports the efforts for solar energy – that has not changed,” says Kim. “However, that majority has clamped quite a bit.”
Support for solar energy peaked in 2016, in which 65% of the posts transmit a positive sentiment about solar energy, while only 7% were negative. By 2022, 58% of the posts was positive and the number of negative items had risen to 28.4%.
“One of the meaningful findings here is that the share of neutral items fell from 41.9% in 2016 to 13.3% in 2022,” says Kim. “This tells us that sentiment against solar energy has become considerably more polarized.”
The researchers also found major differences in support for solar energy from state to state. On average, the five states that were most positive compared to solar energy between 2013 and 2022 Vermont, Massachusetts, New York, New Mexico and Colorado. The five states that were most negative for solar power were Alabama, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Idaho and North Dakota.
“In addition to regional differences, we have also found significant differences in time associated with the political preferences of an area,” says Kim. “In 2016, for example, the support for solar power in the Republican municipalities was only 2% lower than those in democratically leaning. But by 2022 the support for the solar power in the Republican municipalities was 30% lower.
“If we are interested in expanding cleaner and decentralized energy sources, we must understand the public sentiment against technologies such as solar energy,” says Kim. “This work is a step in that direction and offers insight into how that sentiment changes – and suggestions about what that changes.”
The researchers have made data at city and state level about public perceptions of solar energy that are publicly available at https://solarsentiment.org.
Sentiment analysis of solar energy in American cities: a 10-year analysis using transformer-based deep learning
