Not everything is always as it seems and, from inside a bubble, it can sometimes look a little blurry. In recent posts, I’ve talked about a decline in support for renewables and a need for the industry to more effectively articulate its true value.
Ahead of what could prove to be some pretty seismic elections up and down the country next month, I wanted to do a bit of analysis around the perception of renewable energy in the UK and consider what can be done to enhance it.
To do so, I’ve considered when the renewables honeymoon glow might have started to diminish. The pivot point that I’ve settled on is around five years ago, in the midst of the Covid pandemic that precipitated the unabated cost of living crisis ever since.
My next consideration was exactly whose opinion and support was significant. I have broken it down into independently measured public attitudes, political support and media representation, and also looked fleetingly at some regional differences.
It transpires that there is significant divergence in attitudes across those audiences.
A couple of key takeaways you can immediately see from the visual:
- Public support declines gradually abut remains relatively strong.
- Political sentiment drops more sharply, especially after 2023.
- Media sentiment shows the steepest fall, with a dramatic drop from 2022 onward.
Across the UK, support for renewables has remained high, but it has declined. Public favourability has gone down by c17% since 2021, showing a transition from broad consensus of the vision and promise to a more nuanced position.
We can define three phases:
Public support is becoming more conditional, no longer taken in the light of a purely abstract good, something that we instructively like as ‘green’ or ‘future’. It now needs to be more tangible and ‘present’. Questions of fairness, cost, and local benefit have moved from the margins to the centre of public thinking.
There are also telling regional differences. Scotland and Wales are both more positive towards renewables than either England or Northern Ireland, where opinions are more fractured. Interestingly, the region with the lowest public support, according to UK Government figures, is the north east of England – an area with a supportive regional political environment, effective industrial coordination through the Energi Coast cluster, and some of the biggest opportunity, given the recent announcement by The Crown Estate of the next offshore wind leasing round in the region.
Political positivity has also declined, down c32% overall. That overall shift comes as no great surprise, given the increasingly loud voice of an emboldened right wing seeking difference for the purposes of distinction and prepared to engage in inflammatory and often disingenuous arguments to achieve it.
Political debates increasingly question the pace of moving away from oil and gas, the distribution of jobs and the cost to consumers. Renewable energy is no longer a shared aspiration alone; it is a contested policy space.
At the local level, the shift is even more pronounced. Councils, responsible for planning decisions, are where national ambition meets community impact. Approval rates remain relatively high, but resistance has grown—particularly around land use, infrastructure and perceived local disruption.
But that I believe is, in turn, driving the biggest discrepancy. Media sentiment over that same five-year period has declined by c55%. Media tone – especially in parts of the UK press – has been significantly more negative or conflict-focused than public opinion.
Recent research by the Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR) and Persuasion UK, reported in the Guardian, indicates that, driven by “right wing narrative”, “media coverage of net zero is more than twice as likely to be negative than public attitudes and is driving a false perception that net zero policies are unpopular with voters”.
Controversy drives clicks and sales, so there is an inevitability that media latch onto the first whiff of conflict, but this gap between public favourability (high) and media framing (mixed/negative) is key. Public support may remain strong, but media is leading the shift toward scepticism and driving false impressions that will influence future views.
So, what does all of this mean for an industry that presents huge but time-bound opportunity for the UK and must retain increasingly demanding public and political support?
First and foremost, this should not be seen as a binary battle with oil and gas – that is simply not the fight we need to have. Renewable energy’s green credentials will speak for themselves and, whilst the timescales may be open to debate, it will be the dominant energy trend through the 21st century.
The shift in public favourability is not ideological so much as practical.
What matters is the more immediate and tangible impact from the growth in renewables: the jobs and careers, the skills and training, the investment and community programmes. Those are what people care about and are key to a Just Transition. Public concern in areas such as the North East of England is driven by day-to-day realities of employment and prospects; these are communities with bitter experience and long memories of a previous energy transition and subsequent decades of decline.
We must demonstrate that renewable energy can deliver not just on climate targets, but on everyday concerns – jobs, fairness, affordability and local benefit – in the near term. Today, too much of our own public discourse around renewables is failing to address these concerns. The language of capacities and generation, gigawatts, emissions and GVA, has its place. These are important and will influence treasury and policy, but that is where it should be targeted. It will not win public hearts and minds. The imperative of energy security has never been more stark, but even that does not trump the basics of personal economic security.
So, let’s get the language right. Let’s measure and communicate achievements in terms of the real impacts made on people’s lives, and let’s get the story told by those who are living it and seeing the difference that renewables are making up and down the UK today.
Let’s encourage, empower and support the thousands of small businesses that are growing from their work in renewables to tell their stories; let’s get those of all ages who are learning the skills for future careers to shout about it, and the communities seeing real transformation celebrate it.
Let’s turn up the volume of the silent majority and ensure that minority political agendas and media bias do not erode those futures.