On PetroCaribe: Petropolitics, energopower, and post-neoliberal development in the Caribbean energy region

Progress in Human Geography

2019

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Energy is increasingly used as a lens to study wider social processes. For political ecologists, ‘energy’ has usually been seen as a resource or socio-technical system that gives rise to contentious social relations. This article instead thinks of energy as a materiality with thermodynamic properties. At once, energy becomes an analytical concept with physical and political-economic dimensions. Developing this perspective, the article examines the notion of ecologically unequal exchange and unpacks discussions on how energy systems are co-productive of politicised environments. The outcome is an expanded definition of political ecology set out in relation to three modes of social power.

Section: Energy or Social Life As A Political-ecological Processmentioning

confidence: 98%

Out of steam: Energy, materiality, and political ecology

Progress in Human Geography

2019

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“…Meanwhile, Fidel Castro and Hugo Cha´vez started to integrate the Cuban and Venezuelan national economies. With other Caribbean heads of state, they formed the regional oil-trade bloc PetroCaribe in 2005, which gave Cuba access to Venezuelan oil, in part in exchange for medical services (Cederlo¨f and Kingsbury, 2019;Fletcher, 2017). The Cuban electricity infrastructure, however, was falling into disrepair, not least due to the onslaught of multiple hurricanes.…”

Section: Cuban Energy Policy Since the 1990smentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Today, the PCC touts the 2030 Strategy as a logical continuation of the Energy Revolution, with geographically dispersed renewable energy sources being integrated into the system of distributed generation. This most recent policy turn also comes at a time when the oil imports from Venezuela have declined following the death of Hugo Cha´vez in 2013 and the dramatic drop in oil prices in 2014 and 2015 (Cederlo¨f and Kingsbury, 2019). When the Empresa de Componentes Electro´nicos ''Ernesto Che Guevara'' reopened its gates in 2001, the factory was set to produce PV solar panels.…”

Section: Cuban Energy Policy Since the 1990smentioning

confidence: 99%

Has Cuba exposed the myth of “free” solar power? Energy, space, and justice

Hornborg

Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space

Roos

2019

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Given the many problems with fossil energy, the fact that solar energy still only constitutes an insignificant fraction of global energy use requires explanation. The most common explanation is that multinational corporations with vested interests in fossil fuels have been actively preventing the development of solar energy technologies. But this explanation is difficult to apply to the case of Cuba. This article takes Cuban energy policy since the 1990s as a starting point to understand the sociometabolic prerequisites of a renewable energy transition. In 2014, Cuba embarked on a new renewable energy strategy while 95% of the island’s electricity was still generated from petroleum products. To explain Cuba’s halting renewable energy transition, we demonstrate that modern energy technologies are always embedded in global flows of resources and processes of capital accumulation. The requisite investments of capital and labor in energy technology represent substantial, indirect land requirements beyond the space occupied by the technological infrastructure itself. The theoretical argument is that energy technologies should be perceived not simply as local, politically neutral accomplishments of engineering but as sociometabolic displacement strategies, appropriating space from elsewhere. From an interdisciplinary perspective, this means that assessments of a technology’s “power density” also need to consider the spatial demands of the global economic context that makes the technology feasible. The Cuban case illustrates how visions of a renewable energy transition in both mainstream and Marxist thought will need to be based on a radically transformed ontology of technology attentive to global political economy and energy justice. Ultimately, the global anticipation of a transition to renewable energy implicates illusory assumptions about “technology” that have been taken for granted since the Industrial Revolution.

“…No energy system can provide complete closure, determining ultimately contingent social life, but provides often unexpected possibilities for human action at odds with the political‐economic logic that governs it (Mitchell, ). Concurrently existing energy systems can also engender opposing political‐economic rationales, so that the power over the conversion and distribution of certain energy forms also affords the power to define or delimit the horizons of political possibility (Cederlöf & Kingsbury, ).…”

Section: Energy Use and Infrastructure As A Political‐ecological Processmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Even if an economic process becomes more energy efficient, total energy consumption increases if the economy as a whole grows at the same time. Boosted by domestic oil production and imports from Venezuela (Cederlöf & Kingsbury, ), the carbon intensity of Cuba's total energy supply rose by 22% between 2003 and 2009 (from 2.12 to 2.59 t CO 2 per toe) (IEA, ). Cuba's energy miracle during the 2000s, in other words, was a case of relative rather than absolute decarbonisation.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Maintaining power: Decarbonisation and recentralisation in Cuba’s Energy Revolution

Trans Inst British Geog

2019

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With the Energy Revolution of 2005, the energy and carbon intensity of the Cuban state‐economy decreased by over a third. More than an issue of low‐carbon transition, however, this article suggests that the Energy Revolution was an attempt to maintain social power relations through everyday energy use. Drawing on archival and ethnographic fieldwork in Cuba, the article conceptualises energy infrastructures as co‐constitutive of the ecological conditions for social life. Energy infrastructures shape human action and interaction by operationalising political‐economic regimes of energy distribution. The article traces the state‐socialist logic guiding Cuba's longstanding electrification campaign and shows how a multitude of market‐based energy systems during the 1990s “special period” undermined this logic. By examining three core interventions during the Energy Revolution, finally, it demonstrates how the Energy Revolution recentralised power relations through energy use, re‐establishing the hegemony of the socialist state. If energy use is seen as a political‐ecological process, the maintenance of energy infrastructure is an act that reinforces a socio‐ecological order and, hence, a set of political‐economic relations.