Diagnosing and dismantling renewable lock-ins: Four decades of hydro-thermal path dependence in electricity systems

Carbon lock-in has been widely documented in fossil fuel-based systems, yet its dynamics within renewable energy transitions remain underexplored, particularly in the Global South. Existing frameworks provide limited attention to territorial factors such as project location, technology choice, and service coverage, a gap that is especially consequential in the Global South, where institutional fragmentation and center–periphery divides shape energy transitions. Current approaches also lack ways to trace how multiple lock-ins emerge, interact, and can be dismantled through public policy over time. This paper addresses these gaps through a longitudinal, policy-centered analysis of Colombia's electricity sector over four decades. It applies and adapts the EnergiPolicy LAC framework to examine how policy instruments shape technological, institutional, financial, and territorial lock-ins across stages of the policy cycle. The analysis shows how these lock-ins became embedded in policy and converged into three system-wide bottlenecks: (1) a centralized reliability architecture anchored in large hydro-thermal assets, (2) fiscal dependence that shifts investment risk to consumers, and (3) territorial dualism that excludes rural communities from mainstream energy planning. The study demonstrates how a policy-cycle approach can trace the evolution and interaction of lock-ins over time and identify policy interventions that can reconfigure these dynamics. It also provides a multidecadal empirical assessment of renewable lock-ins in a hydro-thermal system of the Global South, highlighting the importance of incorporating policy design and territorial dimensions into energy transitions research.