Sustainability awareness and smart meter privacy concerns: The cases of US and Germany

We investigate public awareness about sustainability, e-mobility and smart meters in Germany and the US, two countries leading the e-mobility development, but with different sustainability policies. By applying sentiment analysis and Natural Language Processing on tweets from the two countries over the last decade (2010 to end of 2019), we found that the sustainability awareness in Germany is higher than the US. We see that the US is at an earlier sustainability maturity state, creating fertile grounds for establishing sustainability policies on time to shape public opinion. Furthermore, we find that after the introduction of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015, the overall awareness in both countries has increased, showing the potential of such policies. In addition, in contrast to expectations, we see that the smart meter privacy concerns have recently started to deteriorate, possibly as a result of governmental efforts to educate the public about smart meter technology. Finally, we see that the German public tweets more positively about e-mobility, compared to the US, whereas the content of e-mobility discussions differs: Germany is more concerned about e-mobility adoption, whereas the US is more focused on battery efficiency and other technological developments associated with e-mobility.