Barriers to Electrification of the Energy System: Meeting Rising Electricity Demand from Industry and Transport

Doctoral thesis, 2026

In the face of accelerating climate change, electrification is central to the low-carbon transition. However, meeting rising electricity demand from industry and transport requires coordination across technologies, institutions, and actors. This thesis examines barriers to meeting this demand in Swedish and European electricity systems, focusing on stakeholder perspectives, operational and regulatory conditions, and long-term electricity supply under alternative demand and technology pathways.

The research combines three analytical approaches. First, Q methodology identifies stakeholder perspectives on barriers to electrification in Sweden. Second, a bridging analysis between socio-technical and techno-economic perspectives examines bottlenecks across three electricity futures with predetermined investments in offshore wind and nuclear power in Sweden. Third, an energy systems optimization model investigates how barriers to wind and solar deployment, alternative demand trajectories, and uncertainty in nuclear construction affect long-term European electricity investment.

The results highlight governance and institutional capacity as important determinants of electrification. In Sweden, stakeholders cite procedural deadlocks, political disagreements, and coordination challenges as obstacles to electricity infrastructure expansion. Across the three scenarios, bottlenecks emerge in all pathways but differ by technology. Wind and solar deployment is constrained by regulatory and operational arrangements developed around dispatchable generation, while new nuclear power faces financing challenges and uncertainty in construction times.

At the European level, barriers to wind and solar deployment can be represented as capacity expansion constraints in techno-economic models. When national constraints such as land-use acceptance and lengthy permitting reduce wind and solar deployment, reliance on more costly thermal generation increases. The analysis also shows that the timing and magnitude of electricity demand growth influence investment in solar PV, offshore wind, and nuclear power, while onshore wind remains comparatively stable. However, high upfront capital requirements limit the value of early investment to hedge against demand uncertainty.

Overall, the thesis finds that large-scale wind and solar deployment can provide a least-cost basis for electrification, but realizing this potential depends on overcoming institutional, regulatory, and infrastructure barriers. The challenge lies not only in identifying cost-effective pathways, but in creating the conditions to implement them at the scale and pace decarbonization requires.