Georgios Pardalis

Energy efficiency is usually framed as a demand-side concern, yet the pace of renewable expansion increasingly depends on how efficiently supply-side systems integrate new capacity. This paper reframes efficiency as a governance question, examining how policy design, institutional coordination, and planning practices shape system-level efficiency outcomes during the rapid expansion of large-scale solar PV. Using Sweden as a critical case, the study combines qualitative analysis of policy and strategy documents with interviews across public authorities, grid operators, developers, industry representatives, and civil society. Rather than evaluating the technical performance of solar PV, it traces the observable consequences of governance arrangements: grid congestion, curtailment, investment risk, and a growing reliance on compensatory measures such as storage integration and conditional grid connections. The findings show that rapid deployment, in the absence of anticipatory coordination, produces reactive governance responses that sustain expansion but at the cost of rising transaction costs, procedural complexity, and uncertainty. These challenges stem not from technological limitations but from temporal and institutional misalignment between infrastructure planning, spatial regulation, and market development. Sweden’s experience suggests that renewable-led transitions require more than accelerated deployment: system efficiency depends on aligning governance processes with the pace of technological change, with implications for how other national contexts design their own governance frameworks.

Circular economy (CE) policy has largely developed around product markets, where ecodesign, repairability requirements, and extended producer responsibility now form a substantial regulatory layer. In regulated energy infrastructure, where replacement decisions are shaped by depreciation schedules, regulatory review cycles, and procurement rules, these tools have made limited progress. This perspective aims to explain why, and to identify what would be required to address it. Developing a conceptual argument from the electricity sector and generalizing it to regulated network infrastructure, and drawing on recent work on smart grid governance and the economics of infrastructure regulation, the paper distinguishes two modes through which obsolescence is produced. In product markets it is openly recognized and targeted by policy; in regulated infrastructure it is generated by institutional mechanisms whose mandates do not include lifecycle outcomes, leaving the premature replacement of functioning assets untreated as a governable issue. The paper shows that this institutional mode is structurally resistant to self-correction, and argues that bridging the gap requires defining obsolescence as an explicit governance object, with a clear institutional locus and a mandate for lifecycle outcomes, rather than extending existing CE instruments.

The decarbonisation of existing building stocks increasingly depends on renovation, with one-stop shops (OSS) emerging as prominent delivery models designed to reduce complexity and accelerate uptake. However, prevailing renovation strategies remain dominated by performance-oriented paradigms that prioritise modelled energy performance targets and efficiency ratios, understood in energy use per unit of floor area, while often overlooking absolute energy demand, material use and life-cycle emissions. This paper argues that renovation OSS are not neutral facilitators but decision frameworks that institutionalise specific assumptions about renovation ambition, energy demand and system design at early stages of the renovation process. Drawing on a structured synthesis of literature on OSS models and sufficiency, a conceptual framework is developed that links key sufficiency dimensions, space, material, technical and performance sufficiency, to distinct renovation decision stages. Existing OSS practices tend to favour comprehensive renovation scopes, overestimated demand assumptions and performance maximisation, potentially reinforcing system oversizing and unnecessary material intervention. An alternative of embedding sufficiency principles in early-stage assessment, scenario development, system sizing and evaluation criteria can reorient renovation pathways toward proportional and context-sensitive strategies. OSS can be an institutional leverage point for operationalising sufficiency in renovation governance. POLICY RELEVANCE OSSs are driving Europe’s Renovation Wave by turning renovation plans into action. They have evolved from local experiments into structured policy instruments embedded in national renovation strategies and European Union (EU) implementation frameworks. At the same time, sufficiency in building renovations has been recognised within the EU’s 2025 policy framework as a key strategy to reduce emissions, address housing shortages and optimise resource use by making better use of existing buildings rather than constructing new ones. The revised Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD) now requires member states to integrate sufficiency measures into their national building renovation plans. As OSS increasingly shape renovation pathways in practice, their advisory logics and evaluation criteria become critical for translating this mandate into action. Entry points for embedding sufficiency are identified within OSS processes to align renovation delivery with emerging EU policy requirements.

Utility‐scale solar parks are expanding rapidly in Sweden, yet without a nationally articulated strategic vision for solar power. As a result, coordination challenges emerge across technical–material, ecological–spatial, and institutional–procedural domains, with implications for how solar generation is integrated into regional and urban energy systems. This study examines how actors navigate this governance vacuum and how feasibility, legitimacy, and procedural predictability are constructed in practice as technological upscaling outpaces institutional alignment. Drawing on document analysis and interviews, the analysis shows that system‐integration pressures are primarily managed through reactive mechanisms such as storage co‐location and conditional grid‐access arrangements. Spatial legitimacy emerges through uneven county‐level interpretations of agricultural and environmental provisions, producing a patchwork of siting outcomes and reinforcing the pre‐institutional status of agrivoltaics and other dual‐use configurations. Coordination increasingly relies on procedural workarounds, informal harmonization, and intermediary actors who translate ambiguous national principles into workable routines. These distributed and reflexive mechanisms enable continued deployment and support electricity supply for cities, but they also generate unevenness that raises longer‐term challenges related to grid congestion, land‐use conflicts, among others. The study concludes that a sustained expansion will require clearer national articulation of land‐use principles, procedural expectations, and system‐integration pathways.

This study aims to assess the factors influencing homeowner behaviour regarding climate-adaptive renovations. This study extends the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) by integrating additional factors such as inherent homeowner qualities (IHQs) and building attributes (BAs) to better capture climate-adaptive renovation decisions. Different configurations for the impacts of these additional factors were tested, and their correlation to homeowner attitudes (ATs) and homeowner intentions (INTs) was studied. The results indicate that attitudes related to beliefs about climate change impacts are the strongest predictors of climate-adaptive behaviour. It was also found that IHQ was a strong determinant of homeowner attitudes and had a strong indirect impact on homeowner intentions to perform climate-adaptive renovations. Given the significant role of cognitive attitudes in shaping climate-adaptive behaviours, policy interventions should focus on fostering more climate-conscious attitudes. Targeted public campaigns can highlight localised climate risks and the benefits of adaptive renovations. Sharing narratives from regions affected by severe climate events, potentially in the form of targeted workshop sessions, could make climate risks more tangible, especially for those without direct exposure, fostering greater public engagement and adaptive actions.

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