World's darkest and clearest skies at risk from industrial megaproject
eso.org
eso.org
A sacred cow, indeed. It's a green energy operation powered by both wind and solar to generate hydrogen, electricity and ammonia. Here[1] is the AES Andes press release about this project, if you care to read the opposing spin on this matter:
"AES Chile submitted an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) to Chilean permitting authorities for a proposed industrial-scale green hydrogen project called Inna. The project, which is in early-stage development, could include a variety of solutions, including green hydrogen for export or domestic consumption, aligned with Chile’s National Green Hydrogen Strategy."
[1] https://www.aesandes.com/en/press-release/aes-andes-submits-...
Land use. It's not just a fossil fuel shill talking point.
But if you look at the production side, they are building a solar power plant. How is that green washing? There is no way to use a solar power plant other than to collect renewable energy. Either it is operational and collects renewable energy, to send it to various places, or it is not operational, but then it's been a bad investment for the investors. Now, maybe it could be part of some greater scheme where one uses this plant as the "source" of a multiple of the ammonium it can actually produce, and sells ammonium from fossil sources as made by Chilean sun. But that should then be addressed on its own, and not hamper the project itself (although of course a different location would be better that doesn't risk the operations of scientific instruments worth billions).
No doubt the petrochemical companies want to continue existing, but shifting the transportation infrastructure away from directly burning gasoline and natural gas is a net win even if in the short term there are still hydrocarbons involved. Going all in on electric vehicles only is not diversifying the solution space enough.
Storage also includes flywheels and pumped hydro. Hydrogen is mostly a farce.
Hydrogen on the other hand clearly is pushed by fossil fuels since it leaves the door open for them to be a major player.
550 Wh/L would also be for the first lithium sulfur batteries to market, they'll double that down the road.
Running a reactor full-bore on shore, pumping ocean water, desalinizing it, electrolyzing it to hydrogen, cryogenically separating nitrogen from air, and combining the result to produce ammonia, might look really inefficient in isolation, but might be efficient enough when compared against the alternative. When the costs of logistics, personnel, and capital are accounted for, it might even come out ahead. That having been said, the amount of waste oxygen this would produce is immense, and could create risks of its own. Ammonia is also more likely to produce NOx when combusted in air than hydrogen is, so that's not great, either.
Sails are very promising - a cargo ship would need enough fuel to maneuver in port and to generate electricity en route, but for most of the trip it could rely on (computer-controlled) sails.
Neither of these options are mature today, but they're a lot closer than nuclear-powered cargo ships.
This is untrue.
Maersk launch a commercial 172-metre container ship running on run entirely on green methanol a bit over a year ago and has 25 more new green methanol ships in the build pipeline.
Australian companies have already contracted to supply green methanol sourced from solar farms after their build and trial of methanol shipping (tugboats) in Singapore.
> It simply seems there's no other realistic alternative.
You say that, the world disagrees.
Better not to trigger the bidet crowd.
And talking about the "dirtiness" of batteries but not every other single part of our industry (steel for everything, all the nasty stuff for electrolyzers, etc.) is all part of prioritizing emotional over rational. Public discussion of our energy system is definitely more emotional than rational, and I would argue that the emotional side of things means that we do a lot more fossil fuels and dirty tech, whereas a more rational approach would have us on far more solar and storage than we currently are, or plan to do.
Environmentalists know of the necessity of ammonia, but push back hard on the second.
Michael Liebreich's hydrogen ladder is fairly good at summarizing an honest assessment of where hydrogen will be useful:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/hydrogen-ladder-version-50-mi...
And you'll see that it gets pushed in lots of very inappropriate places.
It's funny how much benefit of the doubt is given to really bad tech, like hydrogen and large nuclear reactors, despite decades of data showing that they always underperform expectations and that people who implement them always overpromise and underdeliver. It's a stark contrast to solar and wind and storage, which always seem to underpromise and overdeliver, and these technologies face huge amounts of undue skepticism not only from decision makers but also the press and the public. There's a lot of decision making in energy that is extremely disconnected from data and reality, and most of hydrogen decision making these days is disconnected from reality.
I agree though that it gets pushed in lots of inappropriate places, where better alternatives exist.
Has anyone proposed one?
Till then we have to balance things out. Space research is important. But so is investment in green technlogy as climate change is speeding up. It is not specially mentioned - but I believe the project is basically about transforming sunlight into liquid fuels on scale. Not the worst industry project by itself. (even though it might mainly exist, to greenwash conventional cars)
Or did you misunderstand me and think I was suggesting it should say those things about the observatory? In which, yes, it very clearly makes the case for the value of the observatory and what will be lost with the construction of the Industrial Park. And that's the only information it provides. That's the point I was maknig. It's a nakedly one sided article, with a clear activist agenda. Every story has two sides.
It is entirely possible that the other side could be "it's a facotry that digs holes and fills them back in and it was chosen by throwing a dart at a map" in which case every single person would rightfully agree that it shouldnt go there.
Or, it could be a factory that is going to store the entirety of South America's CO2 output underground safely and cheaply and it can literally only go there because of a completely unique geological formation.
In which case, a reasonable person might think it's worth it.
Or, more likely, something well in between those two things.
But the reader doesn't know because the article says nothing. That's a bad article. I would hope that no matter what ones views on the importance of dark skies and earth-based astronomy, one should still hope for better articles than this.
All evidence to the contrary, apparently.
One report I found cited "50 km" as sufficient separation. Applying this as a radius you get 7854 square kilometers of land.
> Using the existing infrastructure probably makes it slightly cheaper though.
"it", here, could mean either the "green energy" operation or the observatory site.
I'll stipulate that. None if this is my sacred cow.
Apparently, however, your view isn't operative among establishment Powers That Be. Otherwise "they" wouldn't hesitate to name it, and instead employ euphemisms like "huge industrial complex" and "industrial megaproject." If this were some evil, no good, very bad mining operation or gas and oil field, it would be featured prominently in all of the reporting. And you know it.
Instead, we get euphemisms. One report I read about this specific matter used the term "electrical generation units." A coal plant? Nat gas? Nuclear? No. If it were any of those things "they" would say so, in clear, bright terms everyone would be eager to hate on. But it's wind and solar, so "they" carefully demur, and straightforward terms like "solar panels" an "wind turbines" are deliberately avoided.
It's not any sort of conspiracy, mind you. Everyone just somehow knows that wind, solar, hydrogen, whatever, is sacred and must be spoken of with only the greatest deference, adopting however much linguistic gymnastics seems necessary.
And maybe they'll destroy the dark skies while they're at it. Lot's of horrible outcomes are just stupid mistakes that profit no one. If they CAN discredit solar for a while longer then more money for them.
The odd thing is that when I recount that experience, some people refuse to believe me. Of course they are all city dwellers.
And yes - when it’s a new moon and the haze from the river blots out the stars, the experience is quite akin to having gone blind. In fact, it’s so dark I’ve used some of those nights to develop film at the outdoor sink.
One thing I’ve noted is that wildlife needs to see just as much as we do - I mean, obvious, right? - but those nights are always dead silent. No birds, no insects, no rustles of this that or the other in the undergrowth. Every little noise one makes seems an affront to the cloying, thick darkness. Perhaps it’s the same instinct at play.
My place in wales used to have dark skies, even fairly recently - but LED street lighting along rural roads has put paid to that. I earnestly don’t understand why a lane that sees zero foot traffic and perhaps one car during darkness hours needs a streetlamp every ten meters - while waste collections only happen every six weeks.
Ah, I have become a grumpy old astronomer.
That's possible, and directed/shielded lighting is commercially available.
However, the project's critics have already said that no plan the project comes up with will be good enough - “Even if [AES] do a perfect job, using perfect lights that probably don’t even exist and perfect shielding, there will be an impact and that will be significant [0]
[0] https://www.science.org/content/article/chilean-energy-megap...
Disclosure: I’m a former physicist and I have personally operated an optical telescope with a 15’ dome, as well as a 60’ radio telescope, which probably puts me among 0.01% of world’s population. So I do know a thing or two and care about astronomy.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/cWgWx1RKjEUjavPn8
Whether the facility is built there or 50 km away, it's going to have to draw people from more than a few km away. The entire Taltal district only has about 11,000 people.
Allowing this to proceed will affect _all_ future astronomy projects in Chile. No one is going to splash out on a shiny, new 100m optical telescope (OWL) if anyone can come along and park a city's worth of light just down the road.
Given the size of the site (over 3000 hectares), even lights purely pointed at the ground will still create large amounts of bounce lighting. The ground reflects light up in the sky.
That said, if the goal is to reduce the lighting to the point where it has no impact, one has to ask: what is the point of having lighting at all? I suppose lighting could be restricted to indoor use only, but most commercial operations will expect some outdoor lighting.
Dust everywhere. Backhoes with 360 light coverage that makes a lighthouse envious. Trucks, trucks everywhere! Floodlights! String lights! Crane lights! Temporary light poles! Service lights! Warning lights! A dictionary of lights!
Can they work in the dark without producing so much dust? Can a tiger be a vegan?
Also the development is part wind power, this alone causes wake turbulence. So even if regulation demanded complete blackout after sunset on the penalty to of death the observational quality is still permanently degraded.
The only thing I wish is that some of the parks would be open after dark to shoot landscapes. Most of the parks closed before sunset, so I had to mostly image from roadsides, which was kind of sad.
The Vera Rubin scope, which cost $600+ million, will see first light this July. It's capable of creating a map of the entire available sky every few days. Containing 40B objects, several times more than all previous sky surveys combined.
Half of those images are already threatened by constellations of comm satellites. Another concern is spy satellite imaging. https://archive.is/RzCNI#selection-779.4-779.14
So what compels AES, a US power company, to build a facility there, in all the world ... which would pump out that much pollution?
In a more extreme case we have planetary protection where entire celestial bodies like Mars should remain sterile to preserve the possibility of their further study. It is easy to advance that policy while those bodies remain remote, but if we obtain the capability to develop the inner solar system then, much like LEO, we will do it regardless of the difficulty it imposes on xenobiologists.
European markets also demand European norms to labour and health and environment are met, even if tokenistically. To some it is a form of protectionism.
It's also the "why can't we make it here" reasoning. If you tried to make it in the US it would be white anted out by lawfare. That's what happened to BHP when they proposed metals and minerals processing plants on the Californian coast.
My comment was to the more general "why can't we have nice things" about industrial placement. I spent time in Culpeper and the number of "no more Datacentre" signs were amazing. Old folks who retired to the country don't want them build nearby. It's a large federal and private investment in tech services. And growing.
“American” is the correct adjective in English to describe the United States’ people and government. There is simply no equivalent to the Spanish “estadounidense.”
Furthermore, North America and South America are considered to be separate continents, and if you want to refer to them both together, you say “the Americas”, plural.
I think it's worth pointing out that "the American continent" is not how geography is taught in the US. There's seven continents, one of which is North America and one of which is South America.
So you're making a point which only makes sense in Spanish, in the context of your own education. There's no ambiguity in the US since the only thing "America" can refer to is the USA.
I'm curious how it's taught for you about Europe and Asia. We learn those as separate continents, too, even though it's one land mass. For that matter, Africa is as connected to Asia as South America is to North America, but I'm almost certain you consider Africa its own continent, right?
There are many dark sky communities in the southwest that are otherwise standard car centric unwalkable american towns.
I shoot astro, I love it. I wish skies were darker. But I certainly don't blame my comrades for not giving two fucks about how the sky looks when they are asleep after working two jobs to pay rent.
No one else sleeps or works, right?
Plus, who knows why they work more than one job. Maybe they were "too smart" for school, found out later that they weren't, and now are grasping to close the gap due to hubris and ignorance early on in their life. No shame in making up for lost time/wages, but that's not our fault and we shouldn't have to constantly bend and bow in order to appease the LCD crowd.
How many people get "things that make life worth living" from the Paranal Observatory every year?
Every place I've moves to in recent years looks nice, but you can't enjoy it because passenger cars and trucks have gotten louder without restraint or consequence. This doesn't mean right next to a major freeway, either; half-a-mile (about a kilometer) or more away from most 4-lane roads isn't far enough.
For an example, look up how many tickets in any given city have been issued for an improperly maintained exhaust system.
Police only care about speeding tickets. So much so, that even if a noisy "sports" car is pulled over for speeding, they won't be issued a noise citation in concert.
Why? ACAB.
Cops probably drive around in noisy cars/trucks after work (and some jurisdictions have police cruisers with a throaty exhaust because of course they do), so ticketing those violations isn't in their own best interest.
Anyway, noise is way more of an IDGAF issue for any city in the US.
The government agreed to a radio quiet zone in the areas surrounding ALMA.
But now there's Starlink and other satellite constellations coming on line at an unprecedented pace.
In fact it looks like there's extra effort to let them keep running without causing problems https://public.nrao.edu/news/astronomers-satellite-internet-...
The 2023 experiment with the single-dish Green Bank Telescope (GBT) demonstrated that Starlink beam-forming could reduce radio interference at the primary telescope beam (the "boresight") by as much as two orders of magnitude.
This experiment required coordination between StarLink and the GBT operators at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO).
Another NRAO telescope in North America, the Very Large Array (VLA), has been conducting experiments of its own, in coordination with StarLink and the Navajo Nation. An enclave of the Navajo Nation, the community of Alamo is northeast of the VLA site. Isolated from the main extent of the Navajo Nation, Alamo has close ties to the nearby village of Magdalena, home to many of the VLA workers. This region surrounding the VLA could benefit greatly by StarLink internet services.
The VLA StarLink tests showed that most of the interference comes from the satellite, rather than the terrestrial user terminals.
Tests to automate the process of avoiding interference are ongoing. It will involve sharing observation scheduling and telescope configuration data from NRAO to derive beam shaping modes for the StarLink satellites.
I know that the VLA RF chain has the flexibility to handle this, and that the VLA correlator was built specifically to handle interference of this nature. The design stems from the early 2000's and was informed by increasing interference from GPS satellite constellations.
The process has yet to be automated, but there's cause to believe that it can work.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ad6b24
(I worked on the VLA monitor and control system software design 1999-2005. Many design reviews. Shared an office with the engineer who designed the correlator configuration API.)
Framing does an awful lot of work.
And we're not very far from having many telescopes in space at all. Every year the cost of payload to orbit is getting cheaper. Blue Origin is launching their New Glenn rocket today and SpaceX is having their 7th flight test of Starship in a few days. Starship specifically will drastically reduce the cost of a kg to orbit if it pans out, and this is looking more and more likely.
A significantly reduced launch cost in turn drastically reduces the complexity and cost profile of the actual satellite telescopes.
Operations and maintenance costs will still be much higher even if the hardware and deployment would become equally affordable
Someone just needs to take a page from SpaceX's Starlink playbook and mass-produce telescope satellites. Or someone should pay SpaceX to do it.
If us Europeans and Americans want to look at the sky undisturbed, why don't we build telescopes at home? We can expropriate or block businesses in however big of a radius we want. Or we can buy up all the land around the site we are using in a foreign country instead of keeping the development of the land of the local people. It feels like exploitation.
It's easy to make this about science vs business and I hate light pollution just as the next guy, but it feels gross to shame the local population for wanting to do what we've done with our land already when we can do it at home as well, or pay them to be worth their while to not develop around the site. They should not have to keep their country pristine just because we want to be "pure" with other people's home when we're not with our own. Or pay them enough if it's so important (it is).
Of course, the ELT is proper funded, so the best he can do is making it useless by ruining it's sky for a decade with construction dust and light.
Ammonia makes fertilizer - this plant will help feed millions, dropping food costs. Even if the power this plant is generating won't go directly to families, it will be going into the things they eat and the things they buy in place of power they can use directly.
Actually turn the entire facility off because again being a hotspot causes turbulence.
Why don't we build an all night biker bar next door to your home? It won't cause you any problems like noise or nuisance because they cal always turn off the music or keep closed all night?
Or, they could just build elsewhere.
Astronomy and science is not for the few - it’s for everyone everywhere until the end of history. The energy produced in this project is for the project not for the many. The project is for profit, and the output is short lived consumed by the relative few compared to science which benefits all people from then on.
I’m not saying don’t build the project. Just build it somewhere else where we’ve fucked it up already. The fact this is a singular resource means that’s literally everywhere all over the earth other than this one location.
> Since its inauguration in 1999, Paranal Observatory, built and operated by the European Southern Observatory (ESO), has led to significant astronomy breakthroughs, such as the first image of an exoplanet and confirming the accelerated expansion of the Universe. The Nobel Prize in Physics in 2020 was awarded for research on the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, in which Paranal telescopes were instrumental. The observatory is a key asset for astronomers worldwide, including those in Chile, which has seen its astronomical community grow substantially in the last decades. Additionally, the nearby Cerro Armazones hosts the construction of ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), the world’s biggest telescope of its kind — a revolutionary facility that will dramatically change what we know about our Universe.
The price of launching giant telescopes to space is set to plummet in the next few years with Starship and New Glenn coming online. IMO we should be focusing on that rather than blocking development on Earth to preserve previous investments in ground based telescopes.
The fact you don't know Paranal host many more than "one telescope" doesn't surprise me, as your are obviously very ignorant of modern astronomy.
If clear skies are important enough to block a new development, they should just unlock some land in the Himalayas or Rockies to replace this observatory.
That "just" is sure doing a lot of work in this suggestion.
Destroying an aspect of the dark skies in Chile will absolutely hurt astronomy. No, they would not just be able to move their operations out onto a different mountain range or into the open ocean.