Reassembling Solar Farms, Reassembling the Social: A Case Study of Ping-Tung County in Southern Taiwan

Abstract

In this article, I seek to offer a story of how an industrialized East Asian country, Taiwan, transformed itself into not only a producer of solar photovoltaic (PV) products but also a user of such technology. By highlighting redesignable artifacts, sociotechnical rearrangement, and local government translators, I apply actor-network theory to describe and analyze the emerging phenomenon of solar farms in Ping-Tung County in southern Taiwan, which simultaneously involves human and nonhuman actors. During the postdisaster reconstruction after Typhoon Morakot, 23.481 MW of solar panels were installed in the flood-damaged orchards and fish ponds in central Ping-Tung. The sites of the solar farms are neither the rooftops of buildings nor industrial wastelands. Solar PV products transferred from Western countries to Taiwan are called “redesignable artifacts.” If a certain technological artifact can be redesigned in a certain society, there are a certain number of people who are familiar with such technology and are skilled in its use. In other words, a variety of industrial local knowledge and technological supporting networks are deployed evenly and densely in Taiwan. Artifacts that are “black-boxed” by solar PV manufacturers can have some agency to make new sociotechnical networks, but only through certain “translators.” In my case study, the most important translators are the magistrate of the county government and his green energy team. By connecting local knowledge with expert knowledge and by connecting sites of agriculture and aquaculture with PV equipment workshops, these translators make heterogeneous human and nonhuman actors work in the same sociotechnical network, a symbiotic network of PV technologies, agriculture, and aquaculture. With the black-boxed objects, the solar PV products, in hand, these translators can break up the traditional connections between local farmers and their lands and make new connections among solar PV manufacturers, local landlords, and their lands. In the process of connecting heterogeneous sites, every group redefines its interests and begins an agenda of group formation. Every actor is displaced and seeks a “sociotechnical rearrangement” with other actors.

Keywords:

• actor-network theory
• local government translators
• solar farms
• symbiotic relationship

Acknowledgments

The research work and the writing of this article benefited from the grant “Aim for the Top University Plan” offered by the Ministry of Education, Republic of China (Taiwan), and National Science Council grant NSC 102-2410-H-010-007-MY2.

Notes

 1 The term sociotechnical is generally used by STS researchers. See Staudenmaier 1985, Hughes 1989, Law 1991: 1–23, and Bijker 1997: 269–90.

 2 See Hughes 1989: 51–82, especially nn. 3 and 20 referring to John Law.

 3 For more information about the disputes between the sociology of scientific knowledge and ANT, see Bloor 1999a and 1999b and Latour 1999.

 4 A turnkey solution is a type of technology transfer that is almost equal to a “package plant export.” For more information on technology transfers or technology in less developed countries, also see Staudenmaier 1985 and Shrum and Shenhav 1995.

 5 Chen (2012: 543–48) also suggested that we should shape “different or conflicting concepts” into an organic whole and then reverse “the orientation of hybridization,” which is not within the scope of this article. In the future, I will try to shape these newly established concepts into an organic whole and test its capacity to explain phenomena in the West and elsewhere.

 6 Just as a “sociotechnical rearrangement” is something between an “immutable mobile” and a “fluid technology,” there is a particular kind of “situational order” between “order” and “disorder” in East Asian countries.

 7 All of the concepts mentioned are based on different ontological assumptions (see Latour 2005).

 8 For the story of the invisible techniques in agriculture in central Ping-Tung, see Yang 2007.

 9 Typhoon Morakot produced copious amounts of rain, peaking at 2,777 mm (109.3 inches), surpassing the previous record in Taiwan. The extreme amount of rain triggered enormous mudslides and severe flooding throughout southern Taiwan.

10 The concepts of “localizing the global” and “redistributing the local” were suggested by Latour 2005.

11 Ping-Tung has also been famous for its pig farming for decades; it has the largest population of pigs in Taiwan.

12 For more information on tacit knowledge and local knowledge, see Polanyi 1958, Agrawal 1995 and 2004, Marglin 1996, Turnbull 2000, and Sillitoe, Bicker, and Pottier 2002.

13 The term enroll is an important mechanism to explain the concept of “translation.” Callon (1989) defines four steps of translation, including “problematization,” “interessement,” “enrollment,” and “mobilization.” Latour (1987) also emphasizes the idea of “enroll and control” to elaborate the process of translation. For more information on enroll and translation, see also Callon 1999; Latour 2005.

14 For more information on good local governance, see John 2001 and Bevir 2007.

15 In the first stage, almost all the design and modification of “floating PV systems” took place in the field site by way of “practical wisdom,” “local categorization,” and “tacit techniques,” and such phenomenon could be called “industrial local knowledge” or “local innovation,” as suggested by Yang (2010, 2012).

16 As Latour (2005) reminded us, the most important thing in the description and analysis of certain sociotechnical networks is to trace all of the connections of the human and nonhuman actors in every site and try to answer the questions, how do you make someone do something, how many are we, and can we live together?

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hung-Jen Yang

Hung-Jen Yang is currently associate professor in the Institute of Science, Technology and Society, National Yang-Ming University, Taiwan. He received his PhD in sociology from National Taiwan University. His research interests include STS, renewable and sustainable energy studies, community studies, sociology of religion, modernity, and social theory.