The high-altitude Atacama Desert of northern Chile is a surprising location for scientific insights: Its dry and dusty likeness to Mars makes it ideal for interplanetary testing, and distant worlds are particularly visible to telescopes through the altiplano’s clear night skies. But it is the area's record amount of solar radiation that enabled the National Renewable Energy Laboratory's (NREL's) own breakthrough in the Atacama: Proof that bulk renewable resources can stabilize the power grid.   A Power Systems Discovery in the Desert "There is a myth that says renewable energy produces instability on electrical grids and that we need a conventional generation to compensate it," said Gabriel Ortiz Mercado, an asset manager at First Solar, which developed and operates a 141-MW, thin-film photovoltaic (PV) solar power plant in the Atacama named Luz del Norte.   "On the contrary, our PV plant Luz del Norte is now demonstrating with NRE