Maria Altunay

Doctoral student at the Division of Environmental Systems Analysis, at the Department of Technology Management and Economics. My research focuses on established actors and their role in socio-technical transitions. In my licentiate thesis I criticized the dominant perspective on established energy incumbents by showing that Swedish energy companies actively engage in different business models for solar energy, explaining why they choose to engage in certain models rather than others, and analyzing how their collaboration with new, specialized solar firms developed over time. I am currently studying how the political discourse related to solar energy changed over time in order to explain why cooperative ownership of solar plants (which, in the Swedish context, has often been initiated by municipally owned energy companies) has continuously been less promoted than individual ownership (i.e. rooftop applications).