The Grid, the Land, and the Void: Sweden's Utility‐Scale Solar Expansion under Strategic Absence

ABSTRACT 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.