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Paper short abstract

This paper explores the process of decommissioning renewable energy infrastructure. It looks at the shifting social relations, infrastructural afterlives, and opaque futurities that accompany the unbuilding of a wind farm in Colombia’s energy frontier.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores the process of decommissioning renewable energy infrastructure. It looks at the shifting social relations, infrastructural afterlives, and opaque futurities that accompany the unbuilding of a wind farm in Colombia’s energy frontier. In 2023, EPM announced its decision to dismantle the Jepirachi wind farm, a first-of-its-kind renewable energy project that was built in Indigenous Wayúu land. Alleging financial and legal setbacks, the wind farm was disconnected from the grid in 2023. Its turbines have since remained motionless under the oppressive heat, as a decommissioning process proceeds awkwardly. The end of Jepirachi has undone a variety of relations that sustained the livelihood of Wayúu communities, from cash transfers and water infrastructure, while fueling anxieties about what will remain after two decades of the company's presence. Drawing on long-term ethnographic engagements, this paper asks what it means to endure the demise of a wind farm. It examines the social relations and affective uptakes that envelop the stillness of wind turbines and their imminent dismantling. Such process is viewed as socially and ecologically unjust largely because it is predicated on removing all visible traces of the wind farm, including any plans about what will come after. It is precisely the company’s intent of becoming invisible - after two decades of being the main source of income and basic services for many Indigenous dwellers - that makes the decommissioning process fraught. This shows the Wayúu’s reflective diagnoses of the politics of visibility and opacity of low-carbon infrastructures in their lives and futures.