Abstract

While there has been an increasing interest in exploring the features and possibilities of off-grid photovoltaic projects, less attention has been given to the infrastructural and sociomaterial arrangements through which these types of bottom-up energy projects are organized. Following a long-term scholarly interest in energy infrastructures and their role in enabling material forms of politics, this article analyses how different of the processes of designing, installing, and using photovoltaic energy infrastructures co-produces different forms of energy ecologies and specific forms of local energy publics. In doing so, we seek to advance an empirical and theoretical understanding of the links between off-grid energy infrastructures and the politics and governances of low carbon transitions. The argument is empirically unfolded by unpacking the installation and early operation of two recent off-grid photovoltaic (PV) energy projects in rural areas in Chile. We focus on describing how the design, installation, and use of these infrastructures involves producing specific energy ecologies as well as the organization of local energy publics. In this sense, we suggest that by attending to these processes, we might help to unveil the different kinds of material politics taking place in off-grid PV projects. We focus on the potentially higher forms of plasticity ingrained in these types of off-grid energy infrastructures, which result in varied forms of materializing energy use and in distributing the agencies of the different actors involved.