Sveriges elsystem genomgår stora förändringar och möter ett antal utmaningar och risker. Elsystemet behöver kunna hantera den pågående energiomställningen och tekniska transformationer, men också klimatförändringar och säkerhetshot. Som svar mot alla dessa utmaningar föreslår både myndigheter och forskare att elsystemet behöver stärka sin resiliens. Resiliens avser ett systems förmåga att tolerera, anpassa sig och återhämta sig från utomstående störningar och förändringar, och att på sikt transformeras för på att bli ännu mer kapabelt att hantera störningar i framtiden. Denna förmåga benämns i sin tur som energiresiliens när fokus är på energisystem eller energirelaterade störningar. Resiliens är dock ett begrepp som används i många olika forskningsfält, vilket gör att resiliens har varierande betydelser och saknar universell definition. När det gäller elsystemet har forskningen kring resiliens hittills karaktäriserats av tekniska perspektiv till stor del, som fokuserat på hur de fysiska och digitala egenskaperna hos elnätet kan förbättras. Tekniska strategier för att möta elsystemets utmaningar innebär ofta expansion och utbyggnad av infrastrukturen, vilket är resurskrävande. Hur elsystemet fungerar beror dock inte bara på dess tekniska system, utan påverkas i stor utsträckning av de många sociala aktörer som exempelvis använder el eller arbetar med produktion och distribution av el. De sociala dimensionerna av resiliens i det svenska elsystemet och hur de kan förstås är hittills en till stor del obesvarad fråga.

Den här avhandlingen utforskar vad resiliens i det svenska elsystemet betyder ur ett socialt perspektiv, med fokus på två centrala aktörer: hushåll och elnätsbolag. Med hjälp av resiliens-begreppet undersöks hur hushåll och elnätsbolag tolkar pågående utmaningar i elsystemet, och hur de anpassar sig till dem. Avhandlingen bidrar till kunskap om förutsättningarna för hushåll och nätbolag att tillsammans hantera utmaningar i elsystemet, vilket kan förstås som ett samskapande av resiliens.

Forskningen i avhandlingen presenteras genom fem artiklar, varav tre berör hushåll och två berör elnätsbolagen, och resultaten sammanförs och diskuteras i kappan. Data inhämtades genom intervjuer och fokusgrupper med hushåll och anställda på elnätsbolag. Forskningen använder resiliens-begrepp, praktik­teori och lärande-begrepp som analytiska linser.

Resultaten pekar på flera överordnade insikter kring resiliens i elsystemet. En insikt handlar om att resiliens kan förstås som en pågående process som förhandlas genom vardagsrutiner och diskursiva aktiviteter. Resiliens förhandlas i vardagligt hushållsarbete när hushållen försöker justera sina rutiner kring exempelvis elbilsladdning, uppvärmning och tvätt i tider av energikris eller när de möter nya prissignaler. Resiliens förhandlas också i elnätsbolagen, exempelvis i de anställdas lärandeprocesser, där de gör avvägningar kring hur elsystemets utmaningar ska hanteras både internt och i interaktion med andra aktörer. Båda typer av förhandlingar sker i viss mån hos båda aktörerna, men hushållens främsta interaktion med elsystemet är genom deras vardagsrutiner, medan nätbolag i större utsträckning ägnar sig åt diskussion om elsystemets omställning som en del av sitt arbete. Sätten på vilka resiliens förhandlas formas också tydligt av olika former av kunskap. Det handlar dels om den kunskap som finns inneboende i vardagliga rutiner så som tekniska och praktiska färdigheter. Det handlar också om reflexiv kunskap, det vill säga förmågan att ifrågasätta antaganden som underbygger befintliga rutiner, och att kunna reflektera kring roller, ansvarsfördelning och komplexitet.

Ytterligare en insikt kring resiliens innefattar att förstå länken mellan infrastrukturens utformning och hushållens elanvändning i vardagen. Studierna illustrerar hur hushållens förväntningar på elsystemet formas av elsystemet självt, och huruvida det signalerar att elen är obegränsad eller begränsad. Elnätsbolagen i sin tur har en teknisk förståelse av resiliens där de arbetar för att hushållen i första hand ska skyddas från störningar och förändringar. Ett elsystem som gör att elen upplevs som ständigt obegränsad kan dock ses som problematisk då den understödjer oaktsam elanvändning och en låg medvetenhet kring störningar hos hushållen. Avhandlingen förespråkar därför ett skifte i elbranschen från en teknisk förståelse av resiliens till en mer socio-teknisk förståelse, där hushåll erkänns som en viktig social aktör vars praktiker både påverkar och påverkas av elsystemet. En sådan förståelse bör inkludera hushållens krisberedskap och anpassningsförmåga som en del av elsystemets resiliens, snarare än något som står utanför. Utifrån dessa resultat gör avhandlingen både teoretiska och empiriska kunskapsbidrag gällande hur sociala dimensioner av resiliens i elsystemet kan förstås, samt ger rekommendationer för hur energibranschen kan främja samarbete med hushållen för att möta elsystemets utmaningar.

Avhandlingen föreslår att elbranschen och politiken bör utforska sociotekniska vägar att arbeta med energiresiliens där sociala aktörer som hushåll ses som viktiga medskapare. På så sätt kan elsystemet stödja vardagliga rutiner som hjälper till att både hantera störningar och möjliggöra ett gott vardagsliv på ett resurseffektivt sätt.

Electric power systems worldwide are undergoing transformational changes and face diverse threats, including energy transitions, technological transformation, climate change, and security threats. As a response, energy authorities and research suggest that power systems should strengthen their resilience, referring to the ability to withstand, adapt to, and recover from external disturbances, and over time, transform to better handle future challenges. When applied to energysystems and energy disruptions, this concept is often labelled energy resilience.However, research on energy resilience in power systems has mostly focused on technical aspects, such as securing electricity access by improving physical and digital properties of the grid. Increasing resilience by expanding and reinforcing the infrastructure, however, requires substantial material resources. Meanwhile,social actors involved in producing, distributing, and using electricity also play acritical role, yet the social dimensions of resilience in power systems remain largely unexamined.

This thesis explores what resilience in Sweden’s power system means from a social perspective, focusing on households and electric utility companies. It examines how these actors interpret ongoing changes and threats related to the power system, and how they adapt to them. In so doing, the thesis advances both theoretical and empirical understanding of the social dimensions of power system resilience. More specifically, it contributes knowledge on how households and utilities can jointly address power system challenges. The research is presented infive articles, three focusing on households and two focusing on electric utilities, and the results are discussed jointly in this cover essay. The articles draw on interviews and focus groups, and use concepts of resilience, social practice theory, and concepts of unlearning and relearning as analytical lenses.

The findings highlight that resilience can be understood as an ongoing process evolving through enacted and discursive negotiations. For households, this negotiation typically happens as they adjust everyday practices such as electric car charging, washing, and heating in times of energy crisis, in the adoption of new technologies, or in response to new price signals. For utilities, negotiations are visible in the employees’ learning processes and their interactions with other actors. These negotiations are shaped by embodied and reflexive knowledge, including practical skills and the ability to critically reflect on roles, responsibilities, and complexity. The thesis also identifies signs of a potential shift in the Swedish power system, in which electricity is becoming re-materialized in the everyday life of the studied households. This shift demonstrates the link between infrastructure governance and households’ expectations and practices concerning electricity.

The thesis suggests that the electricity sector and policymakers should explore socio-technical approaches to resilience, in which households are recognized as key social actors whose practices, preparedness, and adaptability are part of power system resilience. This enables a more resource-efficient power system that can both manage disruptions and maintain a good quality of life.

Reflexivity is a critical practice in research, enabling scholars to examine the interpretive, political, and rhetorical dimensions of their work. This perspective paper explores the role of reflexivity in the study of energy transitions, where implicit assumptions often shape research trajectories and outcomes. Drawing on Susur and Karakaya’s (2021) typology, we analyze hidden assumptions across three empirical contexts—aviation, electricity networks, and bio-energy carbon capture and storage.

Our reflexive practice reveals common biases, including a tendency towards techno-optimism, the delimitation of spatiotemporal boundaries that may overstate technological viability, and an implicit normalization of capitalist logics that may reinforce social inequities. We argue that a deliberate, iterative approach to reflexivity enhances the robustness of research on sustainability and energy transitions, helping to uncover taken-for-granted worldviews, definitions, and methodological choices. By sharing our own reflections, we seek to encourage greater reflexivity in energy research, fostering more nuanced, critical, and inclusive approaches to addressing today’s complex and wicked problems.

We conclude by offering recommendations on how reflexivity can be systematically integrated into the research process to strengthen both analytical depth and transformative potential.

Background

In many countries, essential infrastructures, like power systems, are often taken for granted and thus invisible to ordinary people. However, because of energy transitions and climate impacts, the power system in countries such as Sweden is changing. For example, due to variable renewable power sources and increasing demand there is a potential need to deal with changing conditions, including disruptions at an end-use level, which makes the energy system come to the foreground. As argued in the paper, deeper knowledge about people’s understanding of a changing energy system is needed to support households in taking on new roles. The aim of this study was to explore energy resilience from a household perspective by investigating how households make sense of possible future power deficit scenarios. The concept of household energy resilience was used as a lens. Twelve interviews were conducted with people from seven households participating in a trial with remote-controlled heat pumps. The participating households all lived in detached houses in Sweden.

Results

The findings illustrate how the households relate to energy resilience through diverse approaches. More specifically, they anticipate the need to become resilient while questioning the idea that they should have to become resilient, and negotiate resilience as a shared responsibility between the different stakeholders of the grid. These insights reveal conditions under which households anticipate taking more active roles in a changing energy system. However, the insights also show that other energy actors need to communicate clearly which responsibilities they are taking on to support households and the energy transition overall. Households cannot be expected to embrace household energy resilience without reciprocity and other actors’ taking on responsibility.

Conclusions

Our results show that there is potential for more active and engaged electricity end-users, beyond, for example, flexibility programs. However, households’ active participation, including becoming more energy resilient, is conditional on challenges of value, involvement, and reciprocity. The results will be of interest to professionals involved in electricity supply-related matters including suppliers, policymakers, and researchers.

About 15% of the population suffer from migraines and it is estimated that about 40%of all people with migraines would benefit from preventive treatment, but only 3–13%use it. Migraine is a huge burden for society and individuals. Migraines can be intensified by light, and some patients need to stay in a dark room until the attack is over. People with this type of photosensitivity show a clear preference for light color, specifically green, which has been shown to be more comfortable and even pain relieving in some cases. We will present a feasibility study with the aim of preparing a series of experiments to investigate if regular short-term green-light-exposure can prevent migraines. We will present findings from the literature, developed light equipment, and plans for future testing of migraine friendly light solutions.

During the autumn, winter and early spring of 2022/2023, Europe faced rapidly increasing energy prices and threats of power cuts. The situation was consequently labelled an “energy crisis”, and one sector that was severely affected was households. In response to the situation, European households made efforts to reduce and time-shift their energy use to mitigate the effects of the crisis. Considering that domestic energy practices are often difficult to change, particularly in the long term, we find this effect of the energy crisis on households important to understand more deeply. In this paper, we use social practice theory to investigate how Swedish households responded to the crisis and what changes they made in terms of re-configurations of their practices. The aim was to contribute knowledge on how households adapt to a changing energy system with volatile prices, limitations in electric power, and threats of energy crisis. We conducted two rounds of semi-structured interviews with 9 households in single-family houses in the middle and south of Sweden during and after the crisis, in total 18 interviews, to examine what re-configurations of practices emerged and which persisted over time. The results show that significant changes were apparent in primarily the practice domains of heating and hygiene. While some of these changes were temporary, other re-configurations of energy practices persisted beyond the months of crisis and high prices, indicating that meanings of frugality and sufficiency were strengthened. Our results demonstrate that households were reminded of certain electricity use that is otherwise typically backgrounded in homes and that the energy crisis stimulated re-configuration and re-examination of norms as well as reflection on electricity use in general. Finally, we discuss the effects of the energy crisis on household practices in comparison with other crises and disruptions, and point to the importance of communicating clearly with households about the societal effects of their efforts, in order to manage the legacy of this crisis for similar future crisis situations.

Flexible resources aids in enhancing the resilience of a renewable dominated power system. Space heating systems equipped with heat pumps is one such flexible resource. With this background, the current study deals with the quantification of flexibility potential of space heating systems in houses equipped with various heat pump types. A heat pump model is represented using a vapour compression heat pump cycle.

This model is integrated with a thermal model of a house to estimate electricity consumption, for maintaining the indoor temperature at a set value, as flexibility quantification depends on electricity consumption. In addition to this, flexibility potential is quantified by, analysing and incorporating the results on minimum acceptable indoor temperature from twelve interviews with households owning heat pumps, into the integrated model. The results from interviews reveal that, there is an uncertainty in minimum acceptable indoor temperature, as it is dependant on a number of factors such as frequency and duration of interruption, access to additional heating and motivation to be flexible.

Hence, to quantify flexibility using thermal simulations, the indoor temperature is reduced from 20 °C to values between 18 °C and 15 °C, based on minimum acceptable temperatures stated in the interviews. The flexibility potential is quantified in terms of an instantaneous reduction in electric power and reduction in electric energy. By reducing the indoor temperature from 20 °C to the aforementioned values at an outdoor ambient temperature of -5 °C, in about a million single family houses in southern half of Sweden, an instantaneous reduction in electric power is estimated to be 1.6 GW, for the power system with 23 GW plannable power.

Additionally, considering the recovery of the indoor temperature to 20 °C in 24 h, electric energy reduction is found to be between 4.06 GWh and 7.4 GWh, when the reference indoor temperature is reduced to values between 18 °C and 15 °C respectively, over 17.25 h. Furthermore, with time the amount of flexibility offered reduces, becomes negative during the recovery period and finally reaches zero, when the indoor temperature is restored. The results reveal that space heating systems in houses equipped with heat pumps have the potential to enhance the resilience of the power grid during severe grid disturbances. 

Utilizing energy flexibility in households through smart steering of appliances has received attention as one way to reduce power peaks and adapt demand to a renewable energy system. Heating is a big part of the electricity consumption in households, and heat pump technology is growing in popularity for heating detached houses. While there is ongoing research calculating the technical potential for energy flexibility from heat pumps, few studies combine remote control of heat pumps with qualitative research on how households experience this control. The purpose of this study is to find out how long-term steering of heat pumps is experienced by households, how it affects their heating practices, and how they make sense of remote steering as a service. The data originates from an interdisciplinary project combining a field trial where heat pumps of selected Swedish households were remotely controlled for two winter periods, with qualitative interviews with the households. We conducted interviews with 12 participants, before and after the trial.The results show that households were overall positive towards offering flexibility through remote-controlled heat pumps, and that the steering of the heating blended well with normal temperature variation associated with having a villa in Sweden. However, the respondents were mystified by the procedure, which created a ghost in the heat pump. Furthermore, remote steering as a service comes with challenges related to reliability, security, and agency over the heat pump. Important social conditions for adopting flexibility through remote steering of heat pumps are discussed.

Current freight transport is highly dependent on fossil fuels and there is a need for a transition to alternative fuels and technologies. Biogas is a type of biofuel that has the potential to reduce climate emissions from freight transport, while providing additional benefits such as recycling of nutrients and increased energy security. This paper uses theories on the diffusion of green technologies to analyse the barriers and drivers for the increased use and diffusion of biogas in freight transport. The empirical focus is on the region of Västra Götaland in Sweden, and qualitative interviews have been conducted with demand-side actors such as transport buyers, haulage companies and vehicle manufacturers. The results confirm the important barriers observed in previous research, such as the higher costs of biogas, financial uncertainties and lack of infrastructure, as well as the interplay between barriers. The main drivers are an increased focus on sustainability both within the sector and from wider society, as well as the environmental properties of biogas. Specific barriers have also been identified such as a fragmented freight market structure with a mix of large and small transport companies, tight profit margins and reduced capacity for investments. There is also a division of labour and responsibilities between transport companies and transport buyers, which makes it unclear who will drive the transition to alternative fuels. In general, the study shows that the different types of uncertainty are perceived by the actors as being a significant barrier that needs to be better conceptualised in diffusion theory.