Exploring the social acceptance of biomass power

Abstract

Public acceptance and positive media image are among the key features in technology market deployment aside any technical, legal and economic questions. The way technologies appear in various forms of media has a tendency to shape the public acceptance. This study analyses the media image of biomass power in order to understand the recent technology developments needed to overcome global warming. The media sentiment is analysed from both editorial and social media by using M-adaptive tool for media monitoring. The analysis covers three million social media platforms, hundred thousand news outlets in over seventy languages over 236 regions covering a vast number of data points. The results indicate that the public sentiment towards biomass power is more positive in editorial publications than in the social media. It appears that the increasing role of social media for public acceptance may need to be acknowledged in technology deployment issues.

Improving strategic decision making with big data-based media analysis - the case of coal power

“…This study, however, provides new contribution by analysing the media-image of coal power and related cleaner coal technologies CCS and CCU. This is new as comparable previous analysis exists only for renewable technologies (Nuortimo et al 2017;2018a). The findings support and is in-line with the notion that opinion mining may have advantages in analysing media content for decision-making (More and Ghotkar, 2016).…”

“…As an example of new type of software-based applications, a similar method was used by Bursher et al (2015), including media framing from editorial content and automated sentiment analysis. The type of approach used in this paper has been also applied to clarify the public image of some renewable technologies (Nuortimo et al, 2017;2018a). The main motivation for choosing opinion mining, based on learning machine media-analysis, was the ability to analyse large global datasets, and to analyse both editorial content and the social media.…”

“…It might also be necessary to differentiate between the types of media communication and their specific influence as the nature of media, selectivity of media use by the public, or the properties of media may play a role in whether the media effect is indirect, conditional and transactional (Valkenburg et al 2016). The public image of some renewable technologies, such as the solar power and biomass power have been attempted to clarify (Nuortimo et al 2017;2018a). However, the previous literature has not clearly clarified coal power related media-sentiment, or public acceptance, or their influence on the development of related technologies.…”

Linking the public acceptance of wind power to technology deployment

“…Figure 3 that for wind power, the results were mostly positive for both the editorial and the social media. Compared to, for example, the media attention for biomass power during about the same timeframe (Nuortimo et al, 2017), the level of hits was much larger, suggesting that wind power has been well presented in the media. The results also show that the wind power produced more positive hits in social media and also in the editorial publications, but with the ratio being almost two times more in the SoMe content, namely, 24,790 compared to 16,396 hits for the editorial content.…”

Improving strategic decision making with big data-based media analysis - the case of coal power

“…It might also be necessary to differentiate between the types of media communication and their specific influence as the nature of media, selectivity of media use by the public, or the properties of media may play a role in whether the media effect is indirect, conditional and transactional (Valkenburg et al 2016). The public image of some renewable technologies, such as the solar power and biomass power have been attempted to clarify (Nuortimo et al 2017;2018a).…”