“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.” (- Haley Zaremba, below)
An article by Haley Zaremba (OilPrice.com) earlier this year, The Renewable Energy Transition Is Running Out of Places to Go (February 8, 2026), identified several issues of industrial wind complexes that seldom get attention. She speaks from the alarmist/transformationist camp, which makes her points extra interesting.
She begins with three major points:
She then focuses on her case study:
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.
Continuing:
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 the INNA (Integrated Energy Infrastructure Project for the Generation of Hydrogen and Green Ammonia) was scrapped.
“Light pollution,” Haley Zaremba concludes, “may sound like a relatively minor form of environmental degradation, but it can have serious consequences.” She explains:
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.
Continuing:
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.
She concludes as a solar/wind apologist:
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.
Comment
It is not easy being green. ‘Green’ energy has negative environmental consequences. In addition to the above, wind and solar for grid electricity is land- and transmission-intensive.
Anti-fossil-fuel environmentalists either ignore the ecological downsides of “green” energy or acknowledge such as a secondary concern. But how much surface area will they put up with for an inferior energy? How much will the grassroot environmentalists who live next to such machinery complain–and will their concerns be heard by Big Green, the Washington, D.C. elite?