Version 1
: Received: 29 January 2022 / Approved: 1 February 2022 / Online: 1 February 2022 (21:39:15 CET)
How to cite:
Perju-Mitran, A.; Zirra, D.; Mitran, R.A. Assessing Public Interest Towards Renewable Wind Energy Using Google Trends. Preprints.org2022, 2022020023. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202202.0023.v1
Perju-Mitran, A.; Zirra, D.; Mitran, R.A. Assessing Public Interest Towards Renewable Wind Energy Using Google Trends. Preprints.org 2022, 2022020023. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202202.0023.v1
Cite as:
Perju-Mitran, A.; Zirra, D.; Mitran, R.A. Assessing Public Interest Towards Renewable Wind Energy Using Google Trends. Preprints.org2022, 2022020023. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202202.0023.v1
Perju-Mitran, A.; Zirra, D.; Mitran, R.A. Assessing Public Interest Towards Renewable Wind Energy Using Google Trends. Preprints.org 2022, 2022020023. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202202.0023.v1
Abstract
The public interest towards renewable and clean energy is an important part of shaping consumer behavior and policy towards these topics. A “big data” approach towards assessing the public interest for various topics consists in using freely available search frequency data for the Google search engine, through the Google Trends service. The search data frequency can be used to assess public opinion for a variety of topics, such as medicine, climate change and environmental concerns, finance, and economics etc. A study of the public interest towards wind energy topics is reported here. Six Google search keywords (“Wind power”, “Wind energy”, “Offshore wind”, “Wind farm”, “Wind turbine” and “Wind generator”) were investigated in the 2004–2020-time range. All keywords except “Offshore wind” show a steady decrease from a 2008 – 2010 maximum up to 2015, followed by a period limited change in the 2015 – 2020 range. The interest towards offshore wind topics follows a similar trend but increases in frequency starting from 2015 and reaches a maximum in 2018. Overall, the Google Trends data show a decrease of public interests towards most wind energy topics, with the exception of “Offshore wind”, for English speaking users, in the 2004–2020-time range.
Keywords
consumer behavior; Google Trends; wind energy; public interest; environmental marketing.
Subject
Business, Economics and Management, Economics
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
