El sol al servicio de la humanidad: Historia de la energía solar en Chile [The sun in the service of humanity: History of solar energy in Chile] ed. by Mauricio Osses, Cecilia Ibarra, and Bárbara Silva (review)

Reviewed by:

• El sol al servicio de la humanidad: Historia de la energía solar en Chile [The sun in the service of humanity: History of solar energy in Chile] ed. by Mauricio Osses, Cecilia Ibarra, and Bárbara Silva
• Diego Arango López (bio)

El sol al servicio de la humanidad: Historia de la energía solar en Chile [The sun in the service of humanity: History of solar energy in Chile] Edited by Mauricio Osses, Cecilia Ibarra, and Bárbara Silva. Santiago de Chile: RIL editores, 2019. Pp. 218.

El sol al servicio de la humanidad, edited by Mauricio Osses, Cecilia Ibarra, and Bárbara Silva, proposes a general history of the sun in Chile. It has 218 pages in eight chapters written by twelve different authors. This diversity is, precisely, one of the main assets of the book. However, this collective nature also causes its main weaknesses. In general, the book addresses the social, scientific, and technological relationship between a part of Chilean society and the sun, from the late nineteenth century to the present day. To introduce the book, the editors point out that in response to the current global climate crisis, societies are actively seeking new forms of nonfossil energies. This has renewed attention to solar energy and especially to photovoltaic technology. And recently, this has stimulated the interest for historical research on the relationship between human beings and their energy sources.

Nevertheless, beyond the traditional claim of interdisciplinarity in collective works, the book does not explicitly clarify how it addresses the epistemological challenges of working from disciplines as dissimilar as history and engineering. Indeed, the main unresolved challenge of the book is to generate a theoretically coherent argument beyond the interpretative and methodological differences of each author.

In two short chapters, Nelson Arellano Escudero elaborates the book's most compelling argument. His research proposes a four-stage periodization of the history of solar energy in Chile and demonstrates that, from its first moments on a global scale, Chile made important contributions to the global field of solar energy in terms of ideas, knowledge, and the circulation of scientists. Moreover, he proposes an epistemological and methodological approach that he calls "intersected scales," which allows him to rigorously assume the multidimensionality of the factors that intervene in the history of solar energy. In fact, this author clearly demonstrates that the simple availability of diverse technologies to "harvest" the sun did not guarantee the development of a sustainable solar energy industry. He argues that the reasons for the underdevelopment of solar technologies in Chile are not technological, scientific, or even natural; on the contrary, they are cultural and social. Thus, the research stresses that the reproduction of representations [End Page 677] of solar energy and photovoltaic technology as saviors of humanity set major obstacles for the development of an affordable and democratic solar industry. Moreover, these myths hide the historical reasons leading to the discarding of solar sources and technologies.

Further on, Osses, Miriam Roth, and Roberto Rondanelli address solar irradiance measurement and recording technologies in Chile. The authors describe the technological characteristics of the instruments used to generate quantitative information on irradiance. Very clearly, they explain the characteristics, operation, advantages, and disadvantages of each instrument and detail some of their main uses. Furthermore, they demonstrate that Chile actively and promptly participated in a global discussion on how to measure the sun's energy on earth. In fact, all solar irradiance measurement instruments, such as heliographs, pyrographs, and pyrheliometers, can be historically located in Chile and associated with the local and international scientific networks that used them.

Later, Roth, Pedro Sarmiento, and Ibarra explain how solar radiation has been converted into usable energy. In this case, they count the number of dissertations on solar energy in the academic history of Chile and develop a descriptive exercise. More precisely, they describe the technologies and applications of solar energy used in Chilean history in clear and accessible language for the unacquainted reader. Further on, Roberto Román and Ibarra explain how the research and development of a solar industry functioned in the difficult conditions imposed during the dictatorship from 1973. Specifically, they demonstrate that the neoliberal and authoritarian state...