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 the public. 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 develop a unique dataset encompassing more than 30,000 German news articles about heat pumps, published between 2018 and 2023, building on CommonCrawl 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.