Public intermediaries in the energy transition - A study of municipal energy advisors in Sweden

Licentiate thesis, 2023

To mitigate climate change, a transition toward more sustainable energy production and consumption is crucial. In particular, this requires widespread adoption of renewable electricity technologies, such as solar photovoltaics (PV). As the adoption of such technologies can be challenging for new adopters, support actors such as intermediaries (i.e., brokers between actors in the adoption process), play a crucial part in facilitating adoption. While intermediaries have gained increased attention in the transitions research overall, the roles of public intermediaries (i.e., publicly funded intermediaries with a policy mission) in the energy transition remain unclear.

This licentiate thesis takes a mixed methods approach to increase the understanding of the roles of public intermediaries in the energy transition. More specifically, it studies how public intermediaries operationalize their policy mission, and why, as well as how public intermediation can be improved. To this end, the case of municipal energy advisors in Sweden is studied through 129 activity reports, 22 semi-structured interviews, and a survey to both the municipal energy advisors and solar PV installers. The outcome is presented in this compiling synthesis and three appended papers.

The findings reveal that the roles of public intermediaries depend on how they operationalize their policy mission. Public intermediaries perform a wide range of activities on both an actor and system level, thus displaying different behaviors. This varying operationalization results from top-down, middle-out, and bottom-up influences, where the middle-out influences are shown to be crucial in shaping the roles of public intermediaries. These findings stress the importance of considering public intermediaries’ individual agency when designing and implementing policy missions to maximize their potential contribution to the energy transition.