The unfinished promise of solar infrastructure: Spatiotemporal entanglements in Mexico's energy transition

This article examines the suspension of the Yucatán Solar PV park, a 70 MW utility-scale project halted through a grassroots legal injunction. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Yucatán, the study situates the project within Mexico's hydrocarbon legacies, uneven geographies of electricity provision, and histories of infrastructural neglect. Conceptually, the paper approaches infrastructure as a spatiotemporal and affective entanglement, emphasizing how promises, absences, and suspension reshape present and future geographies. The analysis unfolds across four dimensions: the embedding of solar infrastructure within existing hydrocarbon energy landscapes framed by promises of clean energy transition; the everyday labor of retrofitting neglect and infrastructural absence; the displacement of responsibility through solar siting and uneven benefit distribution; and the material and affective afterlives of suspension. The article argues that infrastructures exert political power beyond their operational life. The case demonstrates how suspended solar infrastructure reconfigures land, labor, socio-ecological relations, and future expectations even in the absence of energy production. In doing so, the paper contributes to critical scholarship on energy transitions and infrastructure studies by foregrounding infrastructural incompletion as a constitutive condition through which low-carbon infrastructures are experienced, governed, and contested.