Political-economic approaches are increasingly used in the study of low-carbon energy transitions. This article brings attention to two dimensions that have been less explored by this scholarship. First, research on the political economy of energy transitions, which has centered on the fossil fuel industry and to a lesser degree on the residential sector, has not sufficiently considered the role that industrial energy users play in resisting and in shaping energy transitions. Second, empirical analyses have focused on the limitations to a transition toward low-carbon energy systems that neoliberal forms of energy governance generate, thereby leaving unexplored cases in which neoliberal restructurings enacted by the state accelerate energy transitions. By analyzing the relationship between the recent boom in renewables energy investments in Chile and the energy consumption practices of the copper mining industry, I show the importance that changes in energy systems can have in the reproduction of specific regimes of accumulation. Drawing on insights from the political economy of energy and the scholarship on the role of socio-natural reconfigurations in addressing capitalist crisis tendencies, I argue that the recent changes in the energy sector in Chile can be understood as a “socioecological fix” to alleviate the threatened accumulation process of its mining economy. I describe the new energy policy implemented in Chile to show how the neoliberal model for promoting renewable energies and the increased financialization of the renewable energy sector, while successful in quickly stimulating a utility-scale renewable energy sector, has also created socioecological impacts and uncertainties in energy forecasts.
By putting into conversation theories of capital devaluation, the scholarship on the socioecological fix, and critical energy studies, this paper offers a conceptual framework to study the phase-out of fossil fuel energy infrastructure. The concept of moral devaluation is presented, which emphasises the interaction of economic, political, and socioecological dimensions shaping the main forces, constraints, and regulatory mechanisms to devalue emission-intensive fixed capital. This notion of moral devaluation is useful to inform empirical research on the institutional arrangements through which the devaluation of fixed fossil fuel capital is resisted and organised. Moreover, this notion complements current studies about the possibility of a capital switch to renewable energies as a socioecological fix to the climate and other entangled crises of capitalism, by emphasising that the devaluation of fixed capital represents a constraining condition for the rapid emergence of a socioecological fix based on fixed capital formation in the low-carbon energy sector.
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