Public Acceptance of Renewable Energy Sources: a Case Study from the Czech Republic

Abstract

The substitution of traditional energy production with renewable energy sources (RES) in the European Union (EU) represents a multidimensional issue with its pros and cons viewed differently by governments, technology companies, markets, as well as the general public. There are significant public doubts in expediency of investments in renewables in place. Our paper studies the factors related to the public opinion on renewables using a reasonable and representative sample of respondents (N = 1026) from one of the EU Member States, the Czech Republic, via a set of ordinal regression analyses with spline correction for ordinal predictors. Our results suggest that the population of the Czech Republic is split in half in its trust in renewables as a substitute to traditional energy sources. In addition, our results show that the opinions on renewables in the Czech Republic are significantly related to personal concerns on environmental protection and worries about use of nuclear energy. Moreover, we find that traditional mass media is not statistically significant, even though internet news channels and social media were statistically related to the opinions (negatively and positively, respectively). The comparison of the responses with respect to the frequency of following social media support the hypothesis of the media bubble. The empirical results indicate that public opinions on renewables are likely to be built on the information sources vulnerable to hoaxes, bubbles, and misinformation. We conclude that more media presentation on RES is needed and make some practical suggestions for the stakeholders, journalists, and relevant policymakers.

A visualization of the energy-saving problems

“…The article "Green gold" highlights that the round-up on last year's global investment in clean energy shows that renewables continued their rapid ascendancy, bringing multiple benefits for all [5]. In recent years, many authors analyze not only the problems of energysaving as such, but also related educational and behavioral aspects, as well as development strategies in Future [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16].…”

Resilience of the electric sector after COVID-19 and the impacts on the photovoltaic solar energy market

“…The atypicality of the moment and the sustainability of the electrical system, taking into account the preservation of the public electricity distribution service, should be evaluated in several shades, especially the solar system [11], [12]. The CCEE's stance should be to seek the maximum effort to analyze the pandemic reality with its degree of complexity and its impacts in the most diverse sectors, with the mitigation of involuntary damages, structuring and reevaluating positive commercialization models for the sector, without preferably, make disproportionate transfers to the consumer account, resulting from the compensation of the seasonalization risks [9], [13].…”

“…In particular, the solar heats the Earth, fuels life, and there is the technology that transforms it into electrical energy. Its implementation is associated with public opinion, representing a multidimensional problem in politics, technology, market businesses, reliability and the cost-benefit ratio [11], [12]. Ortega-Izquierdo and Río [11] developed the implementation of renewable sources in European Union (EU) countries and evaluated the cost/benefit ratio of the photovoltaic solar system with water, biomass/biogas/waste, wind and geothermal.…”

Sustainable education: altering the opinions on renewable energy sources

“…The ability, willingness and the actual results in European Union (EU) countries differ significantly. Therefore, the indicators of public opinions on renewables concern: 1) the possibility to fully replace the sources of electricity by renewables; and 2) the subjective evaluation of the current situation with renewables in a country [19,20]. The exact wording of the questions is presented below.…”