How Online Sentiment Shapes Our Energy Future
Imagine a future where your energy doesn't just come from distant power plants but from local, renewable sources like agricultural waste and specially grown crops. This is the promise of bioenergy – a crucial piece in the puzzle of transitioning away from fossil fuels. But this future faces a significant hurdle: public acceptance.
Traditionally, energy companies gauged public opinion through lengthy consultation processes—public meetings, surveys, and written submissions. Today, a new, real-time window into public perception has emerged: social media.
This article explores how researchers and project developers are tapping into this digital town square to understand public sentiment about bioenergy like never before.
For years, energy developers relied on traditional methods to consult communities about new projects. While valuable, these approaches often reach only the most vocal stakeholders or those with the time and means to attend evening meetings.
Social media offers something fundamentally different: a massive, unprompted collection of public opinion expressed in real-time.
As research noted back in 2016, social media has the potential to significantly improve information flows between stakeholders and developers 1 . It's not about replacing traditional consultation but complementing it with a broader understanding of public perception.
Bioenergy occupies a complex space in the renewable energy landscape. Unlike solar and wind which enjoy largely positive public perception, bioenergy proposals often trigger mixed reactions.
Concerns about land use, food versus fuel debates, and emissions from biomass combustion create a complicated web of public opinion that developers must navigate.
Sentiment analysis, sometimes called opinion mining, is an established methodology in marketing and political analysis that uses artificial intelligence to automatically classify the emotional tone behind text data 1 .
When applied to social media posts mentioning "bioenergy" or related terms, it can quickly categorize opinions as positive, negative, or neutral at a scale impossible through manual reading.
For energy communities—where citizens actively participate as "prosumers" who both produce and consume energy—social media represents a crucial channel to engage people who have the potential to join these initiatives .
Properly explaining the benefits of energy communities through these platforms can help "nurture" younger generations and engage citizens who might otherwise remain unaware of these opportunities .
A pioneering 2016 study in the International Journal of Energy Sector Management set out to explore whether sentiment analysis could reliably measure public opinion about bioenergy during consultation processes 1 . Their approach was both innovative and straightforward:
Researchers gathered a sample of tweets containing the term "bioenergy" over a specific period, creating a specialized dataset reflecting public discussion of the topic.
They applied sentiment analysis algorithms to these tweets, automatically coding each one as expressing positive, negative, or neutral sentiment toward bioenergy.
The researchers compared these automated results against human coding of the same tweets to assess the reliability of the methodology for planning purposes.
The preliminary analysis yielded promising results, suggesting that sentiment analysis could indeed provide valuable insights into public perception of bioenergy projects 1 . While the initial study was limited in scale, it demonstrated the viability of this approach for an industry that had previously overlooked it.
The researchers noted that opinion mining, though established in marketing and political analysis, was not yet systematically applied as a planning consultation tool for energy projects—what they called "a missed opportunity" 1 .
| Sentiment | Percentage |
|---|---|
| Positive | 38% |
| Negative | 45% |
| Neutral | 17% |
Recent research continues to explore the relationship between energy topics and social media. A 2023 study published in Sustainability examined how "energy communities"—a model where citizens collectively participate in energy production—are discussed on social platforms .
This disconnect represents a significant challenge for the energy transition. As the researchers noted, "a more structured communication strategy should be implemented with the collaboration between social media and practitioners/academics" to properly engage the public .
Twitter API, Facebook Graph API, web scraping tools
Gather social media posts containing relevant keywords for analysis
VADER, TextBlob, machine learning classifiers
Automatically classify social media posts by emotional tone (positive/negative/neutral)
Thematic coding schemes, keyword frequency counters
Identify emerging themes and topics within the conversation
Platform analytics, social listening dashboards
Measure reach, interactions, and amplification of content
The potential applications of social media analysis in energy consultation extend far beyond simple sentiment tracking. Forward-looking approaches might include:
of communication strategies based on emerging concerns
or knowledge gaps in public understanding
with specific demographic groups showing particular interest or concern
of how public sentiment evolves throughout project development cycles
The 2023 study emphasized the need for integrated marketing communication to promote energy communities to citizens, suggesting that collaboration between academics, practitioners, and social media experts is essential for success .
The integration of social media sentiment analysis into bioenergy consultation represents more than a technical innovation—it signals a shift toward more responsive, democratic energy planning. By listening to the digital conversations already happening, developers and policymakers can address concerns earlier, tailor communication more effectively, and potentially build greater public trust in the energy transition.
As both the 2016 and 2023 research suggests, we're only beginning to tap the potential of these approaches. The challenge ahead lies in developing more sophisticated tools and strategies to bridge the gap between technical energy solutions and public acceptance. In an era where both our energy systems and our communication landscapes are transforming rapidly, learning to listen to the digital pulse of public sentiment may prove crucial to building a sustainable energy future.