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Social acceptance is essential to effective sustainable energy policy implementation. Social media offer new platforms to support policy work and, by allowing emotional expressions, help to create an emotion discourse. Emotions and the discourse around them impact social acceptance by influencing organizational legitimacy, supporting and disrupting institutions, and energizing policy actors. This research investigates how social media analytics (SMA) can be used to decode the emotion discourse on sustainable energy to fulfill diverse informational goals of policy actors. Applying SMA to 6528 Twitter messages for 27 U.S. electricity utilities over five months, we demonstrate how to measure and compare the emotion discourse of utilities over time. Using a variety of SMA techniques, we find the emotion discourse around sustainable energy varies across utilities in terms of both magnitude and polarity and we …