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In a survey of 2000 people, researchers at Cardiff and Bath universities explored public support for low carbon heating technologies (including heat pumps), and the factors that influence this support.
The survey found the majority of the respondents had at least a small amount of knowledge about low carbon heating options, and when provided with further information, held favourable views. Heat pumps (likely due to their prominence in policy discussions) were identified as the low carbon heating technology with the highest level of support.
Concerns about energy security, and pro-environmental attitudes were two factors which led to higher support for heat pumps. But the research also uncovered another important driver: knowing someone who has already had one installed.
Dubbed the ‘social circle effect’, people’s willingness to adopt low carbon heating options increased if they knew even one person who already had a heat pump.
Commentary & Analysis
11th March 2026
The government’s newly published Local Power Plan points the country in a direction that the British public support: clean energy that’s transparent, affordable, and delivers real benefits to communities and their local environments.
When we asked about the three most important factors for involving local communities on infrastructure proposals, both the public and MPs were most likely to select “clear, plain language information about the project and its impacts” and “being asked for views early, before decisions are made”. These were followed by “a clear explanation of how views influenced the final decision” for MPs and “independent or trusted organisations running the process” for the public.
When we asked which 3 factors people felt were most important in terms of influencing their support or opposition for local infrastructure projects, they picked: the project’s impact on the local environment, on energy bills and on the local community as the top considerations.
These three priorities are consistently the highest for all groups across age, gender, region, social grade, housing tenure, political support, education level, ethnicity, and whether they live in urban or rural areas; a rare point of alignment between these different subgroups of the public.
Strikingly, what made much less of a difference were people’s views about climate change and net zero.
This doesn’t mean that belief in (or concern about) climate change isn’t a critical foundation on which to build engagement around clean energy in general (this is the core idea behind linking the ‘how and the why’ on net zero, as we argued in our recent message testing work with Public First).
But when it comes to specific clean energy projects, the local impacts and financial considerations loom larger: as the transition becomes ever more place-based, this trend is only likely to accelerate.
What does climate ‘salience’ mean in 2026?