Study finds support for solar energy has become politically polarized

(Press-News.org) A new analysis of social media posts finds public support for solar energy remains high, though that support declined significantly from 2016 to 2022. The study also found solar power has become an increasingly polarized issue, with the shift in support being driven largely by opposition to solar power among people in regions that lean Republican.

“The U.S. saw significant growth in the solar energy sector between 2013 and 2022, but that growth has not been spread evenly across the country – some areas have seen more deployment of solar energy technologies than other areas,” says Serena Kim, corresponding author of the study and an assistant professor of public administration at North Carolina State University. “We wanted to assess attitudes toward solar energy at both the local and regional level, as well as how those attitudes have changed over time.

“These attitudes can influence policies that have a significant impact on sustainable energy, and our findings suggest that attitudes are largely being driven by politics,” Kim says.

For this study, the researchers collected more than 8 million posts related to solar energy from the social media platform previously known as Twitter, spanning the years 2013-2022. These posts are from users who had included location data on their public-facing accounts.

The researchers then used analytical tools to characterize the sentiment of each post as positive, negative or neutral toward solar energy.

“We found that a majority of people support solar energy efforts – that has not changed,” Kim says. “However, that majority shrank quite a bit.”

Support for solar energy peaked in 2016, with 65% of posts conveying a positive sentiment toward solar energy, while only 7% were negative. By 2022, 58% of posts were positive, and the number of negative posts had increased to 28.4%.

“One of the telling findings here is that the proportion of neutral posts decreased from 41.9% in 2016 to 13.3% in 2022,” Kim says. “This tells us that sentiment toward solar energy has become significantly more polarized.”

The researchers also found big differences in support for solar power from state to state. On average, the five states that were most positive toward solar energy between 2013 and 2022 were Vermont, Massachusetts, New York, New Mexico and Colorado. The five states that were most negative toward solar power were Alabama, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Idaho and North Dakota.

“In addition to regional differences, we also found significant differences over time associated with an area’s political preferences,” Kim says. “For example, in 2016, support for solar power in Republican-leaning municipalities was only 2% lower than that in Democratic-leaning municipalities. But by 2022, support for solar power in Republican municipalities was 30% lower.

“If we are interested in expanding cleaner and decentralized energy resources, we need to understand public sentiment toward technologies like solar energy,” Kim says. “This work is a step in that direction, offering insight into how that sentiment is changing – and suggestions as to what is driving that change.”

The researchers have made city- and state-level data on public perceptions of solar energy publicly available at https://solarsentiment.org.

A paper on the work, “Sentiment Analysis of Solar Energy in U.S. Cities: A 10-Year Analysis Using Transformer-Based Deep Learning,” is published open access in Journal of Computational Social Science. The paper was co-authored by Crystal Soderman of the University of Colorado Denver; and Lan Sang of the University of Colorado Boulder.

This work was done with support from the University of Colorado Denver’s Presidential Initiative on Urban and Place-Based Research and the Infrastructure Informatics Grand Challenge Initiative.

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