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Paper short abstract

Energy communities are local initiatives to produce, consume, and manage renewable energy. Popularly discussed in Sweden, but rarely implemented, they reveal a paradox through how stakeholders mobilise the concept of resilience both to support and oppose them.

Paper long abstract

Energy communities (EC) are new actors in the Swedish centralised energy system. Defined as local initiatives to produce, share, and manage renewable energy, ECs have been met with enthusiasm from the public, and resistance from large actors. This situation has been described in academic and public debates as surprising, given that the democratic ideals and renewable transition upon which ECs are built upon, align with core Swedish societal values.

In this work we examine how ECs are framed in Swedish media, with a focus towards the socio-technical futures their potential establishing enact. As Swedish ECs remain in their infancy, media coverage plays an important role in shaping public understandings. We draw on framing analysis (Goffman, 1986), showing that the national coverage of ECs reveals a paradox centred on the concept of resilience. Media narratives often portray ECs as desirable actors which can strengthen the energy system’s resilience through decentralisation, flexibility, and local participation. However, resilience is also mobilised in opposing narratives in which decentralised energy production undermines the system’s stability.

Resilience becomes a frame through which competing visions of the future energy system are articulated, the illustrated debates indicating a struggle for a hegemonic meaning of resilience in the specific context of the renewable energy transition. Therefore, there is an embedded temporal aspect in the way ECs are presented as an unreached potential of initiatives that never come to fruition. This work highlights how imagined socio-technical futures of resilience can simultaneously promote and constrain the emergence of new energy actors.