Infrastructure development has the power to enrich communities, providing critical public services such as electricity, transport and water. However, it also possesses the potential to be very disruptive to the communities that it serves. Such disruptions include loss of amenity, increased pollution (both noise and air) as well as impacts on the local wildlife. These effects might be considered be minor for society at large but, for the local community, they can be very significant, creating negative sentiment and diminishing public support for the infrastructure development. As a result, a failure to identify and react to deteriorating public endorsement towards infrastructure projects has the potential to lead to delays or even project cancellation.

In this paper, we develop a measure of social sentiment for wind farms. This is a timely approach for analysis amid the current push towards cutting emissions from electricity production, especially given that wind power is a relatively mature renewable technology.