Anticipating Public Acceptance: The Hydrogen Case

Current energy related issues, such as climate change or the oil depletion, demand technological and societal change towards new ways of producing and using energy. One of the challenges coming with the development of these new solutions relates to the impact that these technologies will have on society, and how people will react to these technologies. This phenomenon is often referred to as public acceptance. The relevance of considering public acceptance of emerging technologies is self-evident, especially when thinking of the heavy controversy that surrounded technologies such as nuclear power or CO2 capture and storage. The focus of this study is public acceptance of hydrogen technologies. Hydrogen (and related technologies) may be used in the future, for example, to heat our houses or fuelling our cars. Some believe that hydrogen may help in developing a more sustainable energy system. Others discuss to what extent this is actually possible. For example, it is unclear in which measure hydrogen may contribute to deal with issues like climate change, energy security or pollution; or whether hydrogen could be successfully stored or transported. Ever since I started this research, and every time I was explaining that the focus of my work was public acceptance of hydrogen, the most frequently asked question I received has been “So, are people going to accept hydrogen yes or no? ”. This question is, in my opinion, emblematic of a certain idea of public acceptance that I argue to be technocratic and potentially counterproductive. In this study, it is argued that the technocratic approach to public acceptance implicitly conceptualizes the public as a ‘barrier to overcome’, putting people either in an active position of rejecting something or in a passive position of ‘silently’ accepting it. This study challenges that idea of the public and public acceptance, largely present in the hydrogen literature, and aims at giving voice to the public in a way that citizens may maintain a positive role of ‘contributors’ to innovation. It is argued that the technocratic approach to public acceptance is inadequate particularly in the hydrogen case. Public acceptance of hydrogen is far too complex to be tackled in a ‘yes or no’ fashion. The complexity is three-folded. First, we want to know something on public acceptance of hydrogen even though hydrogen is not yet diffused. This issue, referred to as the issue of anticipation, poses a methodological and substantial question of how can we study public acceptance of hydrogen, when there is neither hydrogen technology to accept yet nor any “public” concern over a possible hydrogen implementation. Second, hydrogen is not only an element or an application (like a hydrogen bus), but rather an entire infrastructure of many different technologies. For example, some citizens may be in favour of an out-of-sight system where hydrogen is used to store the extra energy of renewables, and being against a system that employs nuclear energy. Third, and related to the previous point, the public is heterogeneous is worldviews, beliefs, values and preferences. Different disciplines use a variety of methods to engage stakeholders and the public in technology assessment. Based on the lessons learned from these disciplines, this work proposes and applies an alternative approach to identify the voice of the public in a way that may help the anticipation of public acceptance in the hydrogen case. More precisely, this study aims at identifying the perceptions of citizens on hydrogen technologies in the context of the broader energy related issues. Citizens will look at hydrogen technologies in different ways, having different preferences according to how people look at the world, for example what they consider to be important or what they believe to be an issue relevant to solve. This is a frame, and the frames embed the (possible) preferences towards the different hydrogen systems. Frames define the problems, the solution space boundaries as well as the solutions that might fit those boundaries. In this study, hence, the citizens’ frames we aim to define are problems and solution space boundaries from the point of view of the citizens. In this way, we may infer if and how hydrogen may fit those frames. The output of this study is, ideally, a way of mapping the public through a set of frames A mixture of qualitative and quantitative techniques, namely a combination of focus group technique and the Q method, is used to identify the citizens’ frames. This study involved about 120 lay citizens - resident in Italy or the Netherlands – and produced a set of nine frames embedding the preference towards different hydrogen alternatives. The analysis of the frames identified through our Q studies showed shared points of view across our interviewees on what are the problems related to energy that should be addressed and by whom. Each frame represents a problem analysis, defining diverse and, sometimes contradicting, solution space boundaries. From the frame it is deduced which hydrogen systems may fit these boundaries. The results confirm that the public is heterogeneous and that there is no straightforward answer to the question of whether hydrogen will be accepted, yes or no. For example, it is possible to characterise the frames resulting from this study as environmental and promethean, although it will be shown that each frame expresses this categorization in different measure, making the distinction not so sharp in certain cases. For instance, it is made plausible through the analysis, that more radical green frames may be more compatible with decentralized-renewable hydrogen systems only. At the contrary other promethean frames are less compatible with the idea of a decentralized production, or of citizens producing their own energy. From a promethean point of view ‘energy’ is matter of economic and national interest, not a citizens’ responsibility. New technologies like hydrogen should fulfill the economic and strategic requirements beside the environmental ones. The variety of frames uncovered in this study might help opening-up the idea of the public in the eyes of those professionals who still think of the public as “those who don’t know” or “those who care about safety and the environment only”. The results also challenge the idea of a homogeneous risk-adverse public and stimulate the reflection on how do we think about and represent the public in complex issues involving new technologies. The ramifications of these results are also discussed, and some possible applications of the frames and Q method are proposed. For example, through the frames it would possible to design minipublics, i.e. small groups of lay citizens, potentially heterogeneous in the way of looking at hydrogen technologies. Those minipublics could be involved in deliberative exercises, aimed at reflecting on future technologies like hydrogen from a variety of citizens’ point of view, switching the focus from public acceptance in the classic (technocratic) sense to co-designing. This research leaves open a set of practical and methodological questions. For example, what is the effective relation between the frame and the preference, i.e. is the citizens’ preference actually determined by their frames in practice? And, what is the added value of discursive representation to select minipublics as compared to conventional methods; and how “generalizable” are the findings? In conclusion, there seems to be an alternative to the conventional way of anticipating public acceptance, namely, by addressing public acceptance through the frames identifiable through the Q methodology. This path promises practical applications and suggests further lines of research, to anticipate public acceptance better and better in the future.