c:o/re Fellow 10/26 – 09/27
Nelson Arellano-Escudero, PhD by Barcelona Tech (UPC), Researcher at the Universidad Arturo Prat. Principal researcher of the Fondecyt project 1250560 “The Construction of Solar Chile” (2025-2029) and RWTH Aachen Fellowship (2026-2027), he is currently president of the International Committee for the History of Technology (ICOHTEC) (2025-2029). His research focuses on the history of solar energy technologies, socio-environmental conflicts, and energy metabolism, with publications in Latin America, Europe, and the United States.
Comparative Methodology for Analyzing Cultural-Institutional trajectories in Solar Energy technologies Transformation
Chile is an exceptional case worldwide for the study of solar energy. It has been shown to be the first place in the world where the industrial use of solar energy was developed. Solar radiation was used intensively in the Atacama Desert from the 19th century onward; however, the use of solar energy has since been intermittent, appearing and disappearing from the realm of innovation and the public agenda at least three times during the 20th century. Only in the 21st century has it been integrated into the electrical grid, and the use of concentrated solar power has multiplied. The question that has guided research for the last 15 years has been: Why did a culture with an abundant energy source and the technical tools/skills to use it not integrate it into its daily practices and institutions?
This research approach has proven effective, but it nevertheless faces a series of limitations imposed by the methodological canon: knowledge production does not originate in the Global North, the prototypes are not purely Eurocentric or USA products, nor are they purely autochthonous or indigenous, and they cannot be classified as syncretic.
Furthermore, it is a story that swung back and forth between liberal capitalism, institutional economics, socialism through democratic means, and a corporatist dictatorship that evolved into monetarism (neoliberalism) with multiple institutional transformations and competition between public and private ownership.
The method, which combines recent past with contemporary history, is sometimes unrecognizable to historians who do not accept the use of diverse sources beyond written and oral ones, since objects and their social life, as well as non-human actors in the environment, do not turn out to be viable sources.
Considering all these challenges: How can we study the differences between these cultural and institutional research contexts? What kinds of interferences must we overcome to establish the complexity of the processes of technological evolution? And, in particular, what kind of interdisciplinary research model is needed to produce a narrative of technological transformation for energy harvesting?
Publications (selection)
Arellano-Escudero, N. (2026). Science and Technology for Harvesting Solar Energy: South America and Its Laboratory of Sustainability (1872–1948). In Contesting the Anthropocene (pp. 151-163). Routledge.
Arellano- Escudero, N. (2024). Minería y energía solar: controversias acerca de la sustentabilidad de un uso intermitente (1872-1948). Quaderns d’història de l’enginyeria, 22, 157-174.
Arellano-Escudero, N. (2023). La historia de las tecnologías de la energía solar (s XIX-XXI): balance de 14 años de investigación. Quaderns d’història de l’enginyeria, 21, 279-307.
Arellano-Escudero, N. (2022). Advances in the Research of the History of Solar Energy Technologies. Icon, 27(2), 11-16.
Escobar, B. & Arellano Escudero, N. (2019) “Green Innovation from the Global South: Renewable Energy Patents in Chile, 1877–1910”, Business History Review, 93, 2, 379-375.