Location of ESO's observatories and the INNA megaproject

In December 2024, AES Andes, a subsidiary of the power company AES Corporation, submitted their industrial megaproject INNA for environmental impact evaluation. This complex, planned to be located just a few kilometres from ESO's Paranal Observatory in northern Chile, will have the size of a city like Chile's Valparaíso or Garching near Munich and poses a significant threat to the world's most pristine dark skies.

This map shows the location of facilities at ESO's Paranal Observatory and the planned location of the INNA project. It details the extension of the industrial complex across the Pacific coast and the Atacama Desert, and its proximity to some of the world's most advanced astronomical facilities: the Very Large Telescope (VLT), the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), and the southern array of the Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory (CTAO South). The map is based on publicly available information provided by AES when submitting the project for environmental assessment.

For more information, please check: https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso2501/.