New publication on the public perception of heat pumps in Germany

Lukas Kriesch and Sebastian Losacker have published their new article “Tracking the public perception of heat pumps: A sentiment analysis of German news articles” in the journal Energy and Buildings.

The study examines how heat pumps are portrayed in German public discourse by analyzing sentiment in online news coverage over time and across thematic contexts. The empirical basis is the German CommonCrawl news dataset. In total, 33,131 German news articles related to heat pumps, published between 2018 and 2023, were identified and analyzed using a pretrained Natural Language Inference (NLI) model.

The results show that heat pump–related articles are, on average, framed more positively than the broader news landscape. However, sentiment varies substantially by topic. Coverage related to heat pump adoption and district heating planning is associated with comparatively positive sentiment. In contrast, articles addressing rising heating costs, grid strain management, heat pump thefts, and especially the debate surrounding Germany’s Buildings Energy Act (GEG) exhibit more negative sentiment. Longitudinally, the analysis reveals a sharp decline in sentiment in early 2023 during the heated controversy over the so-called “heating law,” followed by a gradual recovery thereafter.

Overall, the findings highlight the thematic heterogeneity and volatility of acceptance-relevant discourse around clean-heating technologies and demonstrate how scalable text-as-data methods can monitor shifts in technology legitimacy over time.

The article has been published as Open Access.