Opinion Mining of Green Energy Sentiment: A Russia-Ukraine Conflict Analysis

Abstract

In this paper, we assess sentiment and emotion regarding green energy through employing a social listening analysis on Twitter. Knowing the sentiment and attitude of the population is important because it will help to promote policies and actions that favor the development of green or renewable energies. We chose to study a crucial period that coincides with the onset of the 2022 Ukrainian–Russo conflict, which has undoubtedly affected global energy policies worldwide. We searched for messages containing the term “green energy” during the days before and after the conflict started. We then performed a semantic analysis of the most frequent words, a comparative analysis of sentiments and emotions in both periods, a dimensionality reduction analysis, and an analysis of the variance of tweets versus retweets. The results of the analysis show that the conflict has changed society’s sentiments about an energy transition to green energy. In addition, we found that negative feelings and emotions emerged in green energy tweeters once the conflict started. However, the emotion of confidence also increased as the conflict, intimately linked to energy, has driven all countries to promote a rapid transition to greener energy sources. Finally, we observed that of the two latent variables identified for social opinion, one of them, pessimism, was maintained while the other, optimism, was subdivided into optimism and expectation.