Coordination and Alignment in Sweden’s Battery Ecosystem : An Innovation Ecosystem Perspective on Sustainability and Resilience

Sammanfattning

Batteries have a crucial role in the green energy transition. They are used for storing renewable energy and fossil-free transportation. Although, the production of batteries also involves sustainability and supply chain challenges. Sweden has strong ambitions on becoming one of the first fossil-free countries. Thus, tackling these problems are crucial for reaching the sustainability goals.This thesis examines how coordination and alignment dynamics affect Swedish ecosystem’s capacity to achieve sustainability goals and improve resilience. Ecosystem-as-structure perspective is applied to analyze the actors, activities, roles and links in the ecosystem. The study is qualitative and follows a cross-sectional design. The data collection was done through semi-structured interviews with 15 actors from academia, industry and policy. Swedish battery ecosystem has strengths in research, industrial experience, policy ambition and access to fossil-free electricity. The findings show that these strengths are weakened by fragmented coordination, unclear responsibilities and insufficient knowledge transfer. Moreover, underdeveloped value chain activities were identified as refining, material processing, production scaling and recycling. These, combined with raw material dependency are weakening resilience. While recycling and circular activities may improve resilience over time, they are not sufficiently developed currently. The study concludes that the Swedish battery ecosystem is not mainly constrained by an absence of relevant actors. The insufficient coordination between the actors is creating a deeper constraint. It influences if the existing strengths can be combined in order to achieve sustainability goals and improve resilience.