Exploring Public Opinions on Renewable Energy by Using Conventional Methods and Social Media Analysis

Istvan Ervin Haber,Gabor Pinter,Mate Toth,Kinga Haber,Robert Hajdu

doi:10.3390/en14113089

Abstract

Renewable energy is one of the most discussed topics nowadays, more so than traditional combustible energy sources and nuclear energy. There is an apparent need to study its public acceptance and the general public’s knowledge about it, especially in the context of more advanced inventions, such as smart grids, energy storage, or photovoltaic inverters. In this research, the results of a custom survey and those of several types of public social media datasets were processed to gain insights into the acceptance and awareness of these technologies. The second aim was to investigate technologies and related public opinions about manufacturers. One social media dataset was processed by a novel technology based on automatic data collection from popular social media sources, blogs, forums and public news. All the collected and anonymized data were restored in a custom-made data lake (unstructured database) and analyzed by a natural language processing (NLP) engine to extract the required information. The results showed that the Hungarian public’s knowledge differs from the European reference values by a very high percentage. A further goal for new research in the investigated area will be to achieve a business intelligence rated system in order to predict future trends and events. Since different methods provide results from different viewpoints, the conclusion is that combined analyses have to be used for investigating popular topics related to energy, such as various technologies, issues related to energy transition, or even car sharing services for a sustainable future.

Highlights

Renewable energy sources (RESs) are becoming an increasingly important part of the energy mix in the European Union (EU)
Two different methods with three different data sources were introduced for public knowledge, popularity and satisfaction estimation on RES related topics
A total of 716 answers were received for the survey, which shows the public acceptance and the understanding of the wide population about RES related novel technologies

Summary

Introduction

Renewable energy sources (RESs) are becoming an increasingly important part of the energy mix in the European Union (EU). Their presence in the overall energy mix of European countries has been constantly rising for the last thirty years; it is important to know the extent of the public acceptance of these technologies. The status of renewable energy sources in a given country depends on several factors, such as economic resources, the availability of renewable resources and acceptance. From the above countrylevel data, it is clear that the use of these resources does not necessarily depend on the country’s economic performance (GDP), but it is clear that there is a “gap” between northern, southern and eastern European countries [2]. This article explores the reasons for this from the perspective of public acceptance by using social media analysis and a public survey, which are considered to be useful tools for such a purpose [3,4], since they can provide a deep insight into people’s opinions on a given topic

Objectives

Methods

Findings

Conclusion