Three perspectives on challenges to the electrification of industry and transport in Sweden

Licentiatavhandling, 2025

Contemporary environmental problems have catalyzed the need for societal transitions, involving multiple actors and institutions as well as interactions across multiple sectors and scales. Given this complexity, a repertoire of methods has emerged aiming at understanding and guiding change.

Electrification stands at the core of the energy transition across numerous countries and regions and constitutes a pivotal strategy in decarbonization of the energy sector. As demand for low-carbon energy sources grows, it becomes increasingly important to examine the factors that impede and enable the energy transition.

In Sweden, the context of this work, the ambition to achieve net-zero emissions by 2045 hinges on rapid and large-scale electrification of the transport and industry sectors. However, the transition has proven more complex than technical potential alone would suggest. This thesis investigates the factors hindering electrification through two empirical studies, employing three distinct analytical perspectives: narrative analysis, socio-technical analysis, and techno-economic analysis. This is done in two papers.

Drawing on stakeholder surveys and interviews, Paper I applies the Q methodology, a narrative analysis to aggregate stakeholder viewpoints on challenges to electrification. Three meta-challenges to electrification could be identified: 1) Procedural deadlocks, hindering the expansion of variable electricity production, 2) Competing political preferences, slowing the progress of electrification, and 3) Poor governance, hindering an effective electrification process. From these, policy elements on how the directionality of the transition could be secured are proposed.

Paper II explores how technological developments and evolving market conditions impact different electricity futures. By combining socio-technical analysis and energy systems modeling, we identify transition bottlenecks hindering electrification efforts. The socio-technical analysis applies a Multi-Level Perspectives framework to investigate the challenges and enabling conditions of key technologies, while the energy system modeling grounds the analysis in techno-economic feasibility when analyzing three future electricity systems. It is found that landscape-level changes, which represent wider context processes, have been insufficient to promote a shift to an electricity system that has a high share of wind power. Instead, the operational and regulatory regime is strongly influenced by the existing system, which is dominated by synchronous electricity generation from hydropower and nuclear power. Yet, new nuclear power struggles to become cost-competitive in the deregulated electricity market. Thus, bottlenecks exist for all three future electricity systems investigated in this work. 

By integrating insights from the three perspectives, this thesis contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the electrification challenges and offers policy-relevant implications supporting a just and effective electrification in Sweden. Together, the thesis reveals how unsettled discourse, insufficient incentives, infrastructural inertia, and fragmented governance slow transition despite stringent climate targets.