Efficient infrastructure networks bring essential public services to communities, including electricity, transport, and water. However, infrastructure projects can also create significant disruptions, like loss of amenities, increased noise, air or water pollution, or impacts on local wildlife and human health. These adverse effects may lead to negative sentiments and reduced public support, resulting in delays or even cancellations of infrastructure projects. Hence, successful infrastructure developments require identifying and addressing deteriorating public endorsement in a timely manner.

Traditional approaches, like public opinion surveys or long-term panel interviews in the field, require time, money, and human resources. As a consequence, infrastructure developers can find that they have detected a change in public opinion too late to react and ensure their project is developed without interruptions. We propose using sentiment analysis to measure social sentiments across various infrastructure sectors and gain insights into public opinions in an immediate and relatively cost-effective approach.

In this paper, we describe our approach, develop indices of social sentiment, apply this method to wind power generation in the United States and the United Kingdom, and validate sentiment as a proxy for public acceptance. Wind power generation is a relatively mature renewable technology. Given the current push toward cutting emissions from electricity production, focusing on the wind power sector provides an insightful analysis. The literature review discusses the primary concept of social acceptance and the latest developments regarding using social media platforms (specifically Twitter) as a source of sentiment and public opinion. Our results show that the sentiment indices for the wind power sector correlate well with other measures of public acceptance.