One of world’s most powerful telescopes threatened by renewables project

One of the world’s most advanced telescopes could be threatened by light pollution from a planned renewable energy project.

The European Southern Observatory’s aptly named Very Large Telescope sits in Chile’s Atacama Desert under one of the world’s darkest skies. That quality has led to myriad discoveries: The VLT took the first image of a planet outside our solar system and observed the large-scale structures of the universe.

The nearby renewables project — worth $10 billion — will produce and store green hydrogen, but ESO estimates it will generate as much light as a small city. One solution is to just move the project further away, a top ESO official said: “These two things cannot be in the same place. It’s as simple as that.”