Energy Transitions in Latin America Through the Lens of Vulnerability and Resilience

The call for a global energy transition represents a common front in which most countries around the world can jointly engage and collaborate to reduce the shared threat of climate change. However, such a global energy transition toward a low-carbon future involves a myriad of interconnected national processes in which each country strives for the sociotechnical restructuring of its own energy systems, including the way they generate power or electricity. At the same time, structural processes of transition open the opportunity to build energy systems that are not only low-carbon but also more resilient, ideally reducing technical, social, economic, and environmental vulnerabilities at different scales, from the household to the systems level. Through examination of Colombia, Cuba, and Mexico, this chapter unpacks the relevance of energy resilience and energy vulnerability as supporting concepts in understanding energy transitions, focusing on the understudied region of Latin America. In doing so, the chapter evaluates how energy generation and consumption have recently evolved in the aforementioned countries. Such analysis is complemented by a discussion of examples of energy resilience or vulnerability in the context of each national power system engaging in low-carbon transitions.