Solar Energy and Social-Productive Configurations: Regional Features of the Energy Diversification Process in Argentina

Abstract

Low-carbon energy transition is a nonlinear, disruptive, contestatory, historical, and situated process, driven or resisted by multiple actors, requiring complex negotiations between them. By examining the socio-productive configurations around the production and consumption of solar energy, we seek to identify the stakeholders participating in the production and valorization chain (production complex) and discern the sociopolitical and economic relations involved therein. Solar generation in Argentina has made a quantum leap since 2018 with the incorporation of new stakeholders (solar parks, self-generation, and co-generation) and the contribution of facilitating regulations and public policies. The mixed methods strategy used contributed to the overall view of the energy complex and to the difficulties that arise in the practices of development and implementation of solar systems in a specific territory (Cuyo regional economy). San Juan Solar Project provides an overview on the production and enhancement process within the complex. The Smart Grid Project, in one of the Solar Parks in Mendoza, shows the potentialities in the administration, use, and value of renewable source energy. ENERGE expresses a potential trajectory of a local company, and independent professionals, trade workers, and associated industries along the chain manifest the available production capacity and its scope of action. All of them go through particular constraints and contribute, in this process, to the definition of the dynamics of energy diversification and the socioeconomic and political links associated with it.