Each morning, Rosa Chamami wakes to flames licking at cardboard scraps in a makeshift stove in her yard.
The boxes she brought home once held 800,000 high-tech solar panels. Now, they fuel her fire.
Between 2018 and 2024, those panels were installed at Rubí and Clemesí, two massive solar plants in Peru's Moquegua region, about 1,000 kilometres south of the capital, Lima. Together, they form the country's largest solar complex – and one of the biggest in Latin America.
From her home in the small settlement of Pampa Clemesí, Rosa can see the rows of panels glowing under white floodlights. The Rubí plant is just 600 metres away.
Yet her home – and the rest of her village – remains in total darkness, unconnected to the grid the plant feeds into.
