# Public Sentiment Toward Solar Energy: Opinion Mining of Twitter Using a Transformer-Based Language Model

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.13306 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.13306/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 27 Jul 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [An Interdisciplinary Outlook on Large Language Models for Scientific Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04929/) (2023)
- [High Risk of Political Bias in Black Box Emotion Inference Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13891/) (2024)
- [In-Context Learning for Long-Context Sentiment Analysis on Infrastructure Project Opinions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11265/) (2024)
- [Sentiment analysis on electricity twitter posts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.05042/) (2022)
- [Evaluating and improving social awareness of energy communities through semantic network analysis of online news](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01892/) (2022)
- [Curating corpora with classifiers: A case study of clean energy sentiment online](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03092/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Public acceptance and support for renewable energy are important determinants of renewable energy policies and market conditions. This paper examines public sentiment toward solar energy in the United States using data from Twitter, a micro-blogging platform in which people post messages, known as tweets. We filtered tweets specific to solar energy and performed a classification task using Robustly optimized Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (RoBERTa). Analyzing 71,262 tweets during the period of late January to early July 2020, we find public sentiment varies significantly across states. Within the study period, the Northeastern U.S. region shows more positive sentiment toward solar energy than did the Southern U.S. region. Solar radiation does not correlate to variation in solar sentiment across states. We also find that public sentiment toward solar correlates to renewable energy policy and market conditions, specifically, Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) targets, customer-friendly net metering policies, and a mature solar market.