Decarbonizing the world’s energy systems is necessary to prevent the world from warming more than 2º celsius over pre-Industrial averages – the cap that scientists say is necessary to avoid the worst impacts of climate change – but achieving this kind of sweeping change introduces a litany of other economic and environmental drawbacks. 

Utility-scale renewable energy projects are integral to any viable pathways toward decarbonization of the global economy, but the massive size of these developments presents a number of issues, from infrastructure to land use to NIMBYism. Finding appropriate tracts of land for these developments that are big enough and suitable for such an invasive megaproject is no easy task, as pushback against massive solar and wind farms gains traction in many rural areas. 

Just this month, a city-sized renewable energy development in Chile was scrapped after a year-long campaign led by astronomers who want to preserve the darkness of the Atacama Desert’s skies. The Atacama Desert is the highest and driest in the world, making it one of the world’s most ideal and important sites for astronomical observation. As of 2016, light pollution already covered nearly 80 percent of the planet, with a projected expansion of 2.2 percent a year. This means that a place like the Atacama is vanishingly rare. Chile’s highlands are therefore home to some of the biggest and most distinguished telescopes on the planet.

One of these, the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO’s) Paranal Observatory, would have been within five kilometers of the planned green energy site, which would occupy almost 7,500 acres (more than 3000 hectares). The ESO conducted a study on the likely impacts of this potential new neighbor and found that the megaproject would increase light pollution in the skies above the telescope by a minimum of 35 percent and increase atmospheric turbulence, further reducing clarity when observing the night sky.

To nearly everyone’s surprise, the astronomers won, and ??INNA (Integrated Energy Infrastructure Project for the Generation of Hydrogen and Green Ammonia) was scrapped. But some astronomers and activists are concerned that this project is just the first of many to encroach on the nation’s preciously rare dark skies. “We need legislation that will protect these sites forever,” María Teresa Ruiz, of the University of Chile, recently told Scientific American. For her, this would mean expanding protection to cover “not only Paranal and the European observatories but all the observatory sites.”

Light pollution may sound like a relatively minor form of environmental degradation, but it can have serious consequences. Light pollution interrupts critical wildlife patterns for bats, migratory birds, insects (and more) and erodes biodiversity. In addition to these threats to wildlife, brighter night skies also threaten the health and natural cycles of humans, wastes energy and money, and disrupts ecosystems” according to a 2025 report from the World Economic Forum. 

While this represents a major win for the astronomers and the sanctity of dark skies, renewable megaprojects have to go somewhere – and finding suitable sites for their construction is growing harder and harder. In developed countries, rural communities have been pushing back for years against massive-scale green energy projects in their areas, with relative success. And now, developing countries are starting to push back as well after years of bearing the brunt of these outsourced and offshored mega-developments, as well as their negative environmental and public health externalities. 

A successful energy transition will require compromise. Mass-scale solar and wind farms will have to share space with agriculture, rural communities will have to accept some amount of wind turbines dotting their landscapes, and some amount of increased light pollution will have to be accepted. This type of cooperation is not far-fetched. In fact, many astronomers never wished for INNA to be scrapped altogether. 

“How about just moving 50 kilometers?” astrophysicist and Nobel laureate Reinhard Genzel recalls asking of the project. “It’s not that we were saying, ‘Get out.’ We were only saying, ‘Please don’t do it right here.’”

By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com

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