A few months ago, the renewable energy sector suffered from intense scrutiny of new facility projects under construction. Last January, there were hundreds of facilities that were unable to provide the mandatory environmental impact statement (DIA) to proceed with the difficult process of obtaining all administrative permits and being operational within a few years.
Since then, most of the affected energy companies have been chained. Resources in different situations to reverse the decision to exclude them from the race for the great renewable energy boom, thus causing them to lose the coveted permit to connect to the electricity grid. The National Markets and Competition Commission (CNMC) has been rejecting objections from electricity companies for months and now, in a new step in the legal battle, national audience It also makes decisions against the interests of energy companies and denial of precautionary measures to prevent loss of access to the network.
Energy groups must meet strict deadlines for obtaining administrative permits in order to survive and not lose the connection point to the electricity grid; which will force them back to the starting box of a long bureaucratic career lasting about five years. last january Projects with a total power of approximately 15,000 megawatts (MW) were excluded About a fifth of those who choose to skip this stage in the processing process.
The outage led dozens of companies to file formal complaints against the decision. Spanish Electricity Network (REE)The manager of high voltage networks will withdraw grid access permission from projects that have not received the mandatory EIS. The CNMC has received more than a hundred disputes submitted by the affected companies and rejects them en masse and even warned that all appeals received by it will be resolved in the same sense of dismissal as EL PERIÓDICO DE ESPAÑA from the group. The Iberian Press announced.
After the ‘no’ answer from the competition, some energy companies continued the legal battle and as a next step, appealed to the National Court and requested interim measures to immediately stop the withdrawal of grid access permission until the court decides on this issue. It will resolve the essence of the issue and prevent connection capacity from being given to other companies while the process continues.
The Court’s Disputed Administrative Division has not yet ruled on the merits of the matter, but has collected nearly a dozen orders over the past two months systematically rejecting injunctions sought by different energy groups. It allows wind and photovoltaic projects.
One in five projects, KO
The government and the autonomous communities rejected renewable energy projects by a fair combination of forces last January (or in the case of some Autonomous Communities, they did not even have time to work due to administrative collapse), depending on the size of the project. Over 15,000 megawatts (MW), 20.6% of total petitions submitted. After being rejected, the rights to connect to the electrical grid were withdrawn, according to the application records of Red Eléctrica de España (REE). Among the scrapped projects were 10,500 MW of solar photovoltaics and 4,500 MW of wind farms.
last january Projects with a total power of 58,000 MW received the mandatory DIA to move forward with your plans. This was just one of the bureaucratic steps that energy companies had to go through before getting the plants up and running.
After receiving the environmental declaration, the vast majority of projects under construction received preliminary administrative permits from the central government or communities before April 25, and then had to obtain administrative construction permits before July 25 (although the central government approved six additional additional projects). until the end of January to achieve this). They then need to obtain authorization for network connection and commissioning, with the aim of being operational by mid-2025.
The industry wants more time
The renewable energy industry is now warning of an impending collapse in the commissioning of new plants. Hundreds (around a thousand) of green projects have a legal deadline to be operational by mid-2025 and not lose their permit to connect to the electricity grid. And renewable employers are warning about it Due to traffic congestion, most projects will not comply with this temporary limit. This will mean that the entire industry will try to hire suppliers (the same suppliers) to build the avalanche of new installations in such a short time. Therefore, the associations predict that they will need at least two more years to prevent the majority of the projects from falling through.
HE The government has already granted two extensions To facilitate compliance with the entire administrative permit process, which takes approximately five years. In total, 15 months of assistance was approved to meet the requirements of some of the temporal milestones of the entire process (9 months for obtaining the environmental impact statement and an additional 6 months for the construction permit). The executive later vindicated them due to the difficulties posed by the covid pandemic and the overflow of public administrations (especially autonomous communities) to review and approve all submitted applications.
Faced with increasing pressure from the industry to impose a new delay on the construction of new renewable energy plants, the current Government is limited to granting delays to companies and is reluctant to commit to the construction of new renewable energy plants for now. even predicting that he would be willing to do so in the future.