After realizing yesterday that microgeneration is starting to move up in the online world, I thought I’d take a look at traditional media sources. With the Tories’ recent interest in microgen, the fuss about the microgeneration strategy and It’s Not Easy Being Green on the telly, maybe the wider world is starting to become aware of microgeneration too.
I decided to investigate using a completely scientific method. No not Google, LexisNexis. I searched for the word “microgeneration” in UK publications over the past twenty years and found a couple interesting things among the 199 results.
First, here’s the overall trend:
There are four things going on here.
- There’s very little coverage of microgeneration prior to May 2005 and most of that early writing is not in newspapers
- Microgeneration started to appear on the public radar last May. At this time, EST was promoting its last year of PV grant money, the REA had a conference on microgeneration issues, and there was generally more talk about what the UK’s microgen strategy might entail.
- Next you’ve got the debut of Green Dave during the Tory leadership contest in autumn 2005 and lots of fuss about the microgeneration consultation and LCBP in the winter.
- The microgen strategy and budget caused the recent spike in March.
In this last wave of microgeneration interest, only 53% of the publications were newspapers. The next figure shows that this trend holds overall as well, with magazines and trade publications outweighing newspaper coverage. In other words, most of the chat about microgen so far has been within expert circles.
A breakdown of the newspaper figures shows a good mix of broadsheet and other papers (see below) . Looking at the detailed headlines, it seems that newspapers approach microgeneration from a number of different angles including the novelty of the technology, the cost issues, the climate change and policy aspects or – in the case of some local papers – human interest profiles of specific installations.
Although the method’s not perfect (for example, the search missed this well-titled opinion piece from 2000), I think these graphs do show that microgeneration is gaining prominence in the UK media. Most promisingly, the variety of mass media stories suggests that microgeneration has a diverse appeal and hence promoting the uptake of microgen might be encouraged from more than one angle.
I’ll keep tracking the figures for a bit and provide an update later on. For now, though here are some of the punnier headlines from the data set.
- Rooftop generation to give power – and cash – to the people
- Saving on electricity bills can be a breeze
- Renewables; ‘Saving the planet’ vs. reality
- How green is Brown?; Scotland should be encouraged to lead in efficiency
- Microgeneration in the UK should take off…in 2009
Like that last one. I’ll mark it in my diary.
