Global discourses of protest and support of offshore wind energy

As offshore wind energy (OWE) grows popular, stakeholder support and opposition are critical for ongoing development. Platforms like Twitter (X) allow stakeholders to engage and discuss energy sources, often catalyzing future energy movements and actions. The global nature of wind energy development and the diminished geographical boundaries of social media intersect while studying OWE development. This study explores how social media users discursively construct the global nature of OWE through Twitter. Through a discourse analysis of 4,922 tweets, this project reveals that users readily adopt a “globalization lens” when communicating about OWE. When users adopt the globalization lens, they connect local examples to global goals, generalize activist groups, analyze the value of OWE, call for international support of local or national groups, and position regions and countries against each other as leaders in OWE.