Research from Germany analyzed sentiment in online news reporting to investigate how heat pumps are portrayed in German public discourse. It showed that while public perception is generally positive, it is neither uniform nor stable, and dropped significantly during the debates on the German heating law in 2023.
Pumping heat are generally portrayed positively Germany According to new research, the media landscape has experienced periods of negative reporting in recent years.
The research paper “Tracking public perception of heat pumps: a sentiment analysis of German news articles”, available in the magazine Energy and Buildingsexplains that heat pumps have struggled to gain legitimacy among parts of the German public, with adoption remaining relatively low compared to other countries.
It says challenges affecting uptake were voiced during public debates in early 2023 over Germany’s Gebäudeenergiegesetz (GEG), or heating law, a measure intended to speed up heat pump installations but which met with public resistance.
Researchers Sebastian Losacker and Lukas Kriesch, from Justus Liebig University Giessen, used natural language processing techniques to analyze a dataset of a total of 33,131 German news articles about heat pumps, published between 2018 and 2023. This analysis allowed them to investigate how residential heat pumps are framed in German public debate and how major events, including debates around the GEG, are related to shifts in perception.
Their findings highlight that heat pumps have generally enjoyed more positive sentiment than the wider news landscape, indicating a positive picture. However, two significant drops in average sentiment were recorded: one after the restriction of Russian gas supplies in the summer of 2022 and a more drastic drop in early 2023 due to the heating law debate, when sentiment scores entered the negative spectrum.
Losacker explained pv magazine Sentiment remained very negative for several weeks. “During this period, most articles also focused on the heating legislation debate, and the total number of articles increased significantly,” Losacker said.
He also emphasized that the analysis helped provide a broader picture of how heat pumps are discussed in the mainstream media, rather than a benchmark for immediate acceptance. “We therefore see this more as a proxy for public discourse than for individual acceptance,” he explained. “This is an important distinction when trying to understand the social dimensions of the clean energy transition.”
Losacker added that a key conclusion from the research was that discourse is volatile and can change dramatically in response to exogenous events.
“These can be political in nature, but also economic in nature. Consider, for example, how the German PV industry lost its competitive advantage in the late 2000s due to increased competition from China. This also likely translated into more negative sentiment in PV-related reporting at the time,” he said.
Losacker also pointed out that sentiment in articles about heat pumps improved once the debate on the heating law cooled down. “I think this can also translate into greater individual acceptance,” he continued. “As fossil energy becomes more expensive over time and awareness of the benefits of heat pumps continues to grow, I expect the adoption of heat pumps to increase in the medium to long term. At the same time, the energy transition is a complex process and developments are difficult to predict with certainty.”
The regression results in the article show that sentiment values varied significantly between topics, with articles on the heating law debate, rising heat costs and heat pump thefts showing more negative sentiments and articles on district heating planning and heat pump adoption taking on a more positive tone.
“From a practical perspective, our results underline that the public framework of heat pumps is neither uniform nor stable. It varies widely by issue and can change rapidly in response to major policy debates and energy-related events,” the research paper said. “This suggests that policymakers and practitioners should not only focus on deployment targets and subsidy design, but also pay close attention to how policy changes are communicated and contested in the public sphere.”
In the conclusion of the research paper, Losacker and Kriesch add that their research demonstrates the value of scalable, text-as-data approaches for monitoring adoption-relevant discussions around green technologies. “In principle, the analysis could be repeated for other clean energy technologies, such as PV, wind energy or more niche technologies such as carbon capture,” Losacker said. pv magazine. “If we were to look at a different technology, the findings would likely be very different, both in terms of sentiment dynamics and dominant topics.”
Losacker called the energy transition one a highly politicized topic strongly shaped by ideology, both among those who support heat pumps and among those who try to block their adoption. “When we look at the technical facts, the ideological positions of those opposed to the transition to heat pumps are often less well informed and do not adequately reflect the real benefits of the technology,” he said. “But again, technology is always socially constructed. This means that as a society, to understand the energy transition, we cannot completely separate a technology from its social embeddedness.”
This content is copyrighted and may not be reused. If you would like to collaborate with us and reuse some of our content, please contact: editors@pv-magazine.com.
