An uncooperative transition: Material contradictions in Chile's renewable energy boom

Policymakers increasingly take for granted that major private sector investments will be crucial to decarbonizing energy systems. Most decarbonization plans also involve expansion of the electricity grid to accommodate the electrification of processes and technologies currently powered by fossil fuels. Baked into these dominant policies and discourses is the assumption that electricity can and should be treated as a commodity, and must be rendered sufficiently profitable to incentivize large-scale investment to bring about energy transitions. Yet the materiality of renewable energy creates contradictions in this process. Challenges emerge as renewable energy expands, making it harder to continue to grow the industry profitably within market constraints. Building on scholarship which critically examines the neoliberalization of nature and the contradictions inherent to capital accumulation, this paper explores some of these new contradictions and proposed ‘fixes’ in northern Chile. Chile was an early adopter of market-based, competitive electricity regulation in the 1980s, and has been a leader in introducing pro-renewables market reforms. Reforms have successfully sparked an exponential increase in renewable energies, yet variable energies such as the sun and wind introduce new uncooperative characteristics that further complicate efforts to commodify electricity, in some cases rendering prior fixes obsolete. We identify four contradictions that the sun and wind's materiality introduce, related to time, space, pricing and legibility. Though government and corporate actors in Chile are designing various technical interventions to modulate renewables’ uncooperative materialities, including new energy storage and transmission infrastructures, many of these fixes generate new challenges and sometimes contradictions of their own. Ultimately, this paper lays out the socio-environmental and economic risks of today's increasingly hegemonic market-based energy transition strategies – strategies which assume that solar and wind energy can be seamlessly commodified.