West Wake News

A recent study analyzing social media posts reveals that public support for solar energy, although still high, has experienced a significant decline from 2016 to 2022. The research highlights an increasing polarization in attitudes toward solar power, primarily driven by opposition in Republican-leaning regions.

"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," said Serena Kim, corresponding author of the study and 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."

The study involved collecting over 8 million posts related to solar energy from the social media platform previously known as Twitter, covering the years 2013-2022. These posts were analyzed using tools to determine whether they conveyed positive, negative, or neutral sentiments toward solar energy.

"We found that a majority of people support solar energy efforts – that has not changed," Kim stated. "However, that majority shrank quite a bit." Support peaked in 2016 with 65% of posts being positive towards solar energy and only 7% negative. By 2022, positive sentiment dropped to 58%, while negative sentiment rose 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 noted. "This tells us that sentiment toward solar energy has become significantly more polarized."

The analysis also revealed substantial differences in support for solar power across states. Vermont, Massachusetts, New York, New Mexico, and Colorado were most supportive between 2013 and 2022. Conversely, Alabama, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Idaho, and North Dakota showed more negativity.

"In addition to regional differences, we also found significant differences over time associated with an area’s political preferences," Kim added. "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."

Kim emphasized the importance of understanding public sentiment towards technologies like solar energy if cleaner and decentralized resources are to be expanded: "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."

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

The paper detailing this research is titled “Sentiment Analysis of Solar Energy in U.S. Cities: A 10-Year Analysis Using Transformer-Based Deep Learning” and is published open access in the Journal of Computational Social Science.