Public acceptance in energy technology development and deployment. Opinion mining case study

Thesis event information

Date and time of the thesis defence

Place of the thesis defence

Via remote connections: Join Zoom Meeting https://oulu.zoom.us/j/792526428

Topic of the dissertation

Public acceptance in energy technology development and deployment. Opinion mining case study

Doctoral candidate

Licentiate (Tech) Kalle Nuortimo

Faculty and unit

University of Oulu Graduate School, Faculty of Technology, Industrial Engineering and Management

Subject of study

Industrial Engineering and Management

Opponent

Vice-Dean for Education and Research Kristijan Breznik, International School for Social and Business Studies, Celje, Slovenia

Second opponent

Professor Hannu Kärkkäinen, University of Tampere

Custos

Adjunct professor, Dr. Janne Härkönen, University of Oulu

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Public acceptance in energy technology development and deployment. Opinion mining case study

Dissertation applies big data based opinion mining to support long term product development in energy industry.

In energy industry product development, the solid fuel combustion technology development can take a long-time. During the long development time, the external market conditions behind the initial investment decisions may change. The external market environment includes factors such as CO2-price in European emission trading system, environmental regulations, and also public acceptance influencing political decision-making, and regulatory environment development. The negative change in these factors can cause delayed or abandoned product market deployment in the end of product development cycle.

The objective of this dissertation was to clarify the factors that affect technology management and deployment in the energy industry, and to gain understanding how digital market environment monitoring tools, namely opinion mining could be used to support technology strategy process. The specific interest is on bigdata analysis, and the acceptance of energy technologies.

The principal results indicate that constant market environment monitoring can be utilized to see change in factors behind the investment decisions. This may enable making alterations to the chosen product development path within the existing realities. The carbon capture and storage (CCS) specific case indicates that public acceptance of technology is one of the important factors. The factors influencing technology market deployment were mainly external market factors, such as CO2-price, lack of regulations and public acceptance, including perceived stakeholder risk towards the CO2 end-storage.

The created new understanding enables actors in the energy technology sector to better account for public acceptance in the technology development and deployment considerations, and can be used also to focus communication efforts in case of unknown technologies.
Last updated: 1.3.2023