The Regional Government of Arica and Parinacota awarded the University of Chile, representing the Solar Energy Research Center (SERC Chile), the creation of the Ayllu Solar Regional Innovation Center for the 2025–2027 period. The initiative aims to be a center that addresses and promotes innovation, technology transfer, human capital formation, and productivity in various sectors through solar energy-based solutions, based in the city of Arica and covering the region's four communes.

SERC Chile has had a presence in Arica and Parinacota since 2015 with the Ayllu Solar project, which was developed across the 4 communes.

Through the Regional Fund for Productivity and Development (FRPD 2025), the Regional Government of Arica and Parinacota awarded the University of Chile, representing the Solar Energy Research Center (SERC Chile), the initiative titled “Ayllu Solar Regional Innovation Center: Solar Energy for Productive Development (CE-Ayllu Solar),” aimed at strengthening the territory's solar ecosystem through applied research, capacity building, and productive linkage.

The project will have an execution period of 24 months (2025–2027) and originates as a strategic and territorially relevant proposal that will, in turn, provide continuity, deepening, and scaling to the experience developed with the Ayllu Solar project, a SERC Chile initiative in the region between 2015 and 2021. The objective is to ensure institutional continuity and academic capacity to scale results and promote new productive development opportunities based on solar energy.

The director of SERC Chile, Rodrigo Palma, valued the awarding of this initiative. “SERC Chile, in its commitment to maintaining and developing projects in northern Chile to boost solar energy, creates through this project a training and incubation space for new energy projects in the region, aligned with the 2017-2030 Development Strategy of Arica and Parinacota. We want to highlight the value of technological production and research developed in the country, applied to the local context, and make this space available to the entire region through technology transfer.”

From this perspective, CE–AYLLU SOLAR seeks to consolidate itself as a stable institutional space, led by the University of Chile as the executing entity representing SERC Chile, acting as a technical and social articulator in the region in collaboration with public and territorial institutions of Arica and Parinacota. It is projected as an unprecedented and strategic solution that considers a stable operational infrastructure with a productive focus and responds to the needs and gaps identified by society and the regional productive ecosystem.

This image belongs to the commune of General Lagos, where Ayllu Solar worked on an initiative with the Altiplano Livestock Farmers' Association.

The initiative plans to directly benefit around 3,000 people in the region, with interventions in all 4 communes, targeting producers, entrepreneurs, technicians, students, and representatives of local communities in the use, operation, and maintenance of solar technologies.

For her part, the Seremi of Science, Technology, Knowledge, and Innovation (CTCi), Alexia Vásquez, highlighted the importance of promoting renewable energies through innovation initiatives in the region and SERC Chile's interest in maintaining its presence in Arica.

“It is excellent news for Arica and Parinacota to have an advanced solar energy center where the region's comparative advantages are leveraged toward the development of advanced human capital and solutions that contribute to regional development. Furthermore, we expect that the effort made by the University of Chile will contribute to building alliances with regional institutions, training professionals through this coordination,” the authority stated.

Ayllu Solar worked across the four ecological zones of the region.

With this award, the Arica and Parinacota Region reaffirms its strategic role in the national energy transition, consolidating itself as a hub for innovation and development. Ultimately, CE-AYLLU SOLAR is projected as a transformative initiative by leveraging the territory's extraordinary solar potential.