Toward Just Energy Transition: Alternative Models of Distributed Generation Systems with Renewable Energy in Argentina

• In Event: Towards Sustainability - I: Exploring Paths for Transformative Innovation Through Renewable Energy and Waste Management

Abstract

The development of renewable energies has become a key issue in the Latin American public agenda and an opportunity, not only in environmental terms, but also because they offer the possibility of new more democratic and inclusive development models. One of the most relevant alternatives in this regard has been the promotion of Distributed Generation Systems with solar photovoltaics, with a great growth in recent years worldwide.

In Argentina, these initiatives are based on legislative or regulatory systems that replicate models implemented in the central countries. Also, the few experiences developed so far ended up generating new processes of exclusion among those who have the resources and the ability to benefit from this type of system and the vast majority that do not.

The goal of this work is to analyze the development of a distributed generation experience implemented in the province of Santa Fe in Argentina, which proposes an alternative model of implementation of this type of systems. In order to adjust the analytical focus in this type of problem, we seek to reconstruct the socio-technical process in which technologies are designed, produced and used, and the social relations of production, of work, of communication, of power, of sharing, are constructed.

In this way, the analyzed case allows to discuss a dominant energy transition discourse of officials from different public bodies and business chambers that reduces the process of transition to a change in the energy matrix with renewable energies and distributed generation systems.

Author

• Santiago Manuel Garrido, CONICET/Universidad Nacional de Quilmes