Tracking the public perception of heat pumps

Thursday 5 December 2024 12:00-13:00,
UiS Campus Ullandhaug, Elise Ottesen-Jensens hus,
EOJ276/277 / Teams.

A Center for Innovation Research Seminar with Sebastian Losacker, leader of the junior research group TRABBI at Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany

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Welcome to a Centre for Innovation Research seminar:

  • Date: Thursday December 5th
  • Time: 12:00 - 13:00
  • Room: UiS Campus Ullandhaug, Elise Ottesen-Jensens hus, room EOJ 276/277 and on Teams
Link to Teams meeting, Meeting-ID: 387 244 909 920, Password: zx4MpF
  • Seminar speaker: Sebastian Losacker, leader of the junior research group TRABBI at Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany, and affiliated researcher at CIRCLE, Lund University, Sweden
  • Title of the presentation: Tracking the public perception of heat pumps - A sentiment analysis of German news articles
Abstract:

In the transition toward more sustainable energy use, heat pumps play a crucial role. However, large-scale installation of heat pumps has not yet occurred in many countries, often due to locked-in energy technologies and low levels of public acceptance. Given that the diffusion of heat pumps will strongly depend on end-user acceptance, it is important to understand how heat pump technologies are perceived by society. In this paper, we study the sentiment of news articles about heat pumps to reveal changes in public attitudes toward these technologies over time.

We use a novel dataset encompassing more than 25,000 German news articles about heat pumps, published between 2018 and 2023, building on Common Crawl data. We identify news articles about heat pumps using a large language model, and then analyze the sentiment of each article using a pretrained sentiment analysis algorithm. This data is used to identify coherent topics within the corpus of heat pump-related articles, with some topics receiving very positive sentiment scores and others negative.

From a longitudinal perspective, our findings reveal a sharp decrease in the mean sentiment of heat pump articles in early 2023, related to the debate about a new heating law during that time in Germany. Our results also show that the sentiment score gradually recovers from this shock.