It might surprise you to learn that Latin America — including Mexico, South America, Central America, and the Caribbean — was the region that showed the fastest growth in history for solar panel projects last year, according to a recent report from GTM Research. While the area’s 625 MW worth of solar panels installed in 2014 might look small compared to the estimated 6.5 GW installed in the U.S. during the same time (1000 MW = 1 GW), the annual growth rate for Latin America was a staggering 370 percent between 2013 and 2014, while the U.S. was just 36 percent.
Why did that happen? Well, more than three quarters of that growth in Latin America came from the quick emergence of solar panel projects being installed in Chile — in particular, in the high, hot, flat, barren desert lands of Northern Chile. The Atacama Desert has some of the world’s…
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