Green Power, Old Injustices: Colombia’s Energy Transition at a Crossroads

Colombia presents one of Latin America's sharpest energy-transition contradictions. Nearly 60% of its installed electricity capacity comes from hydropower, yet the country remains a major coal exporter and significant oil and gas producer. Many of its best wind, solar and geothermal resources are also located in Indigenous, Afro-descendant and peasant territories marked by energy poverty, weak infrastructure and distrust of large projects.

The study, "Territorial Energy Sustainability: A Framework for Just Energy Transitions in Latin America's Extractive Economies—The Case of Colombia," by María Cecilia Ruiz Cardona and Carlos Humberto González Escobar, published in Sustainability, argues that technical decarbonization alone cannot deliver a just transition. Based on policy analysis, literature review, six megaproject case studies and ten workshops involving 259 participants, it identifies six structural barriers, including weak participation, fragmented governance, exclusion of local knowledge and fiscal dependence on hydrocarbons.

A Clean Grid Still Tied to Fossil Revenues

Colombia's electricity mix is unusually renewable for a major fossil-fuel exporter. In September 2025, hydropower represented 58.6% of installed capacity, while non-conventional renewables had risen to 13.9%, bringing the total renewable share to 72.5%. But this cleaner electricity profile coexists with an economy still tied to coal, oil and gas production.

The dual structure creates a fiscal problem often missing from transition debates. Hydrocarbon taxes and royalties help finance health, education and infrastructure in producing regions. Renewable projects may generate jobs and investment, but they do not automatically replace fossil-fuel revenues, particularly in the short and medium term. Tax incentives designed to accelerate clean-energy deployment can further reduce immediate public income.

The study does not defend indefinite fossil production. It warns, however, that if coal and oil revenues fall before alternative industries, tax bases and public-finance mechanisms mature, social expenditure could contract in precisely the territories the transition is supposed to support.

This reframes the pace of fossil-fuel decline as a policy variable rather than a symbolic commitment. A credible transition must synchronize decarbonization with regional diversification, worker protection, new revenue sources and long-term investment. Otherwise, climate ambition could trigger local austerity and strengthen resistance to reform. Energy policy thus cannot be separated from fiscal policy, industrial strategy or territorial development.

Renewable Wealth, Energy Poverty

The sharpest expression of Colombia's energy paradox is found in La Guajira. The Caribbean department has some of the country's strongest wind and solar resources, with solar irradiance above 5.5 kilowatt-hours per square metre per day and wind speeds of around 9–10 metres per second. Yet electricity coverage stands at only 55.7%, compared with 97.6% nationally, and access is even lower in many rural Wayúu communities.

This reveals how national energy systems can extract value from a territory without delivering basic energy security to the people who live there. Communities may watch turbines and transmission lines rise around them while remaining dependent on unreliable or costly supply.

The Jepírachi wind farm, developed in ancestral Wayúu territory, captures this divide. Technically, it helped establish Colombia's wind-power experience. Socially, the study links it to disrupted grazing routes, restricted access, pressure on sacred areas and tensions over compensation. The project showed that engineering success does not guarantee social legitimacy.

At the centre of these conflicts are competing understandings of territory. Developers and national agencies often view land as a site containing wind, sunlight, water or transmission potential. Indigenous, Afro-descendant and peasant communities may understand it as a living space tied to identity, spirituality, livelihoods, memory and collective survival. These values cannot always be replaced through cash compensation. The authors describe this as an "ontological" conflict: the dispute concerns not only land use, but what the territory represents.

The study's ten participatory workshops, involving 259 actors across nine departments, repeatedly surfaced the same concern: projects often arrive with studies already completed and technical information presented in forms communities cannot easily challenge. Local knowledge of water, biodiversity, leadership structures, historical grievances and cumulative impacts is treated as context rather than as evidence capable of changing a project.

The result is a transition that risks creating a second generation of sacrifice zones. The energy source may shift from coal to wind or sunlight, but the underlying relationship can remain unchanged.

The Transition's Biggest Barrier Is Governance

The researchers combine four evidence streams: analysis of policy and legal instruments from 2001 to 2026, a structured literature review, six megaproject case studies and ten participatory workshops. Their cases cover wind, solar, hydropower, hydrogen and gas infrastructure, including Jepírachi, La Loma, Hidroituango, El Quimbo and Termocandelaria.

Across this evidence, six recurring problems emerge: exclusion of community knowledge, incompatible understandings of territory, participation reduced to procedure, fragmented governance, the Caribbean energy-poverty paradox and unresolved fiscal dependence on hydrocarbons.

Together, these findings shift attention away from technology. Colombia already possesses strong renewable resources, a substantial policy framework and growing investor interest. The deeper obstacle is institutional: how authority, risk and value are distributed between the state, companies and host communities.

The study argues that participation frequently becomes a compliance exercise. Communities may be consulted only after crucial decisions about location, design, timing and ownership have been made. Formal participation therefore does not necessarily produce meaningful influence, encouraging litigation, protest and delay.

Governance is also divided across ministries, regulators, licensing authorities, planning bodies and local governments. National institutions make strategic decisions, while municipalities and departments often manage the consequences without equivalent power or resources. Energy policy, environmental licensing and land-use planning remain insufficiently integrated.

The gap between declaration and implementation is especially damaging because Colombia's policy language is already progressive. Official frameworks recognise distributive, procedural and recognition-based justice. But recognition without institutional power, participation without co-decision and benefit-sharing without binding mechanisms can leave the underlying model intact.

The study connects national ambition with territorial experience, capturing dimensions that capacity targets cannot measure. Its limitations, however, matter. The 259 participants are not statistically representative, and the case-selection strategy concentrated projects already associated with conflict. More cooperative projects are underrepresented.

The authors also acknowledge documentary gaps, confidentiality constraints, conflict-related under-reporting and the fact that their framework has not yet been quantitatively validated or tested outside Colombia. The conclusions are therefore analytically persuasive but should not be treated as a population-level estimate of all renewable projects.

A Just Transition Needs a Territorial Deal

The study's main proposal is the Territorial Energy Sustainability framework, known by its Spanish acronym SET. It identifies six conditions for judging whether new energy development advances sustainability where it occurs.

• Territorial knowledge must become a primary planning input.
• Renewable expansion must generate direct and equitable benefits for host communities through local access, territorial funds, shared ownership or revenue participation.
• Institutions must balance pressure for rapid deployment with the time required for legitimate local deliberation.
• Communities must have both the right to resist harmful projects and opportunities to help design alternatives.
• Armed conflict and illicit economies must be treated as core governance conditions.
• Fossil-fuel decline must be synchronized with new fiscal and economic foundations.

The policy consequences are immediate. Environmental assessments should begin with participatory territorial diagnostics rather than add them after technical plans are fixed. Local governments need stronger decision-making authority, updated land-use tools and resources to manage long-term impacts. Benefit-sharing should move beyond voluntary corporate programmes toward enforceable mechanisms.

Development banks and climate-finance institutions also need broader criteria. Megawatts installed and emissions avoided remain essential, but they do not show whether communities gain electricity, ownership, employment, public revenue or influence. Financing that rewards technical performance while ignoring territorial justice may support projects that are green in engineering terms but extractive in social practice.

For businesses, community legitimacy is not a public-relations accessory; it is a material project risk. Failure to recognise local knowledge and territorial rights can produce legal challenges, delays, higher costs and stranded investments. Shared ownership and credible local benefits may be commercially prudent as well as socially fair.

Colombia's experience exposes the central test of the global energy transition. Clean technology can be inserted into an unequal economy without transforming the relationships beneath it. Wind farms, solar parks and hydrogen projects can reduce emissions while preserving concentrated ownership, weak local voice and territorial exclusion.

A genuinely just transition thus requires more than replacing one energy source with another. It requires a territorial deal in which communities do not merely host the infrastructure of decarbonization but gain access, authority, revenue and a meaningful role in shaping development. The decisive question is not only how fast the energy system becomes cleaner. It is whether the transition changes who holds power.