A Reus entrepreneur drives a Nevada project to power AI data centres.

Reus has left its mark on two energy projects being developed thousands of kilometres away, one in the Nevada desert, in the United States, and another in the Chilean region of Atacama. Behind both is Xavier Lara, CEO of Endura Energy, although the two initiatives respond to different needs. The Dark Sky Energy Park, in Nevada, is designed to supply electricity to large artificial intelligence data centres, while Ibitú, in Chile, will combine batteries and solar energy to store part of its production and make it available to the grid.

The Dark Sky Energy Park is being developed in Nye County, near Tonopah, an area of the Nevada desert with abundant solar resource, large expanses of land and proximity to energy infrastructure. The project is being driven through the special purpose vehicle Endura Tonopah Energy LLC (a subsidiary of the Endura parent company) and was conceived to meet the needs of large electricity consumers, especially AI data centres.

The park includes photovoltaic generation, batteries to store electricity and technologies capable of providing energy when solar production is not sufficient. The objective is for electricity from renewable sources to be available continuously, something relevant for data centres, which need to operate 24 hours a day.

The company is currently working on several fronts, including securing control of the land, defining access to the power grid and structuring future supply contracts with customers. This is also where the experience Lara has accumulated in the energy market comes in.

The similarity with Móra la Nova

It is a changing market because, as the Reus businessman points out, the energy demand of artificial intelligence is changing the needs of new industrial projects: "For example, what the Móra la Nova AI gigafactory is asking for, which is 24-hour renewable coverage with long-term contracts and battery storage, is exactly what we are designing at the Dark Sky Energy Park for artificial intelligence loads," he explains.

Lara also highlights that Endura has already taken part in energy purchase and sale transactions for large American consumers. He cites, for example, hybrid solar and battery projects developed in Texas that closed agreements with Google and Tesla with the help of his company.

Storing the sun of Atacama

The second project is thousands of kilometres away, in the commune of Copiapó, in the Chilean region of Atacama. This is Ibitú, developed by GT4 Energía and Tambo3 together with Endura Energy through the company Ibitú Energía SpA. Its objective is to take advantage of Atacama's huge solar resource and use batteries to store electricity so that it can later be injected into the Chilean electricity system.

The initiative is planned in two phases. The first includes a battery system with a storage capacity of 500 MWh, while the second adds a 100 MWp photovoltaic solar plant.

The project has an agreement for the long-term lease of 146 hectares of private land, with about six hectares reserved for the batteries and about 140 for the photovoltaic plant.

The site is located next to an existing substation connected to a 110 kV transmission line. In addition to the engineering already carried out, the environmental procedures, final grid connection authorisation and various sectoral, local and municipal permits remain to be completed.

The location is also strategic because of the economic activity in the area. Ibitú is located about 36 kilometres from Copiapó, 43 from the port of Caldera and about 20 from the city's airport. Atacama is also one of Chile's main mining territories and concentrates significant industrial activity linked to this sector.

The strong deployment of photovoltaics has led Chile at times to generate more solar electricity than the grid can absorb. In 2025, about 6.2 TWh went to waste, 6.9% of the country's entire electricity generation, according to pv magazine.

Batteries make it possible to store part of this energy and use it when needed, a sector also driven by a regulation approved in 2024 that introduced capacity payments and new sources of income through the purchase and sale of electricity. Chile closed 2025 with about 2 GW of batteries installed, and the sector expects to exceed 6 GW in 2026.