There are too many applications to build wind and photovoltaic parks in Spain, so the Government encourages the most problematic ones to withdraw, those with the least chance of passing the environmental evaluation. This Sunday, January 23, the deadline set by the Royal Decree-Law 29/2021 so that developers who agree not to go ahead with a project that has already been submitted can recover in exchange the economic guarantees required at the beginning of the process, 40,000 euros per megawatt (MW).
The objective of renewables in Spain for 2030 is to build 60,000 new MW. However, today there are requests to connect some 150,000 MW to the grid, mostly wind and photovoltaic. This avalanche not only far exceeds the needs of the country, but has also caused an enormous traffic jam in the administrations. A plug that complicates the adequate environmental evaluation of all the projects and lengthens the time of the procedures, which endangers meeting the deadlines required so that other perfectly viable parks can be approved.
To compensate for the slowdown caused by the avalanche of petitions, in the same Royal Decree-Law, approved at the end of last year, the periods that the different processing steps must comply with were extended, especially in the evaluation phase of environmental impact, where the main bottleneck is found to digest the binge on renewables. Paradoxically, despite being overwhelmed, the administrations must complete the evaluation of each park in order of arrival of the request, even if it is known in advance that one has little chance of getting ahead.
“Given that there are many more projects than necessary and that there are some that are located in more environmentally sensitive areas, I am often asked why not do a cleanup directly,” says Ismael Aznar, general director of Quality and Environmental Assessment of the Ministry for the Ecological Transition, which ensures that this is not possible. “The Administration cannot rule out projects just because, it has to do it in a motivated way, and to do it in a motivated way, it must follow some procedures and have a complete file: it has to analyze the project, the environmental impact study and even the public information that comes from the open consultation processes”.
This entire process takes time and becomes even more complicated when the wind or photovoltaic parks are associated with long power lines that also need to be evaluated, as is the case with a project that seeks to bring renewable energy from Aragon to Barcelona, crossing half of Catalonia, with a route of more than 150 kilometers.
Precisely, the effects caused by evacuation power lines or high-voltage transmission lines, normally due to their excessive length, are one of the most common causes put forward at the moment by the Administration to bring down a project by issuing a negative environmental impact statement. . Other reasons are direct impacts to areas of maximum environmental sensitivity for birds or with some form of protection, among them ZEC and ZEPA, of the Natura 2000 Network. Otero photovoltaic park (505 MW), in Segovia, or the Biota wind farm (58.7 MW), in Zaragoza, are some of the renewable energy projects recently rejected due to some of these environmental issues.
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In some cases, at the beginning of the process, the Administration may directly not admit a project for processing because it is manifestly unfeasible from the environmental point of view (which is also happening when the report of the competent body in Red Natura 2000 of an autonomous community or when the file lacks a field study of birds and bats in areas of migratory passage). However, even in these exceptional situations, before that, an analysis of the file and the reports of the different environmental bodies must be carried out.
As the general director of Quality and Environmental Evaluation of the ministry explains, “at first, many applications were submitted, it was a very fast process, and perhaps now the promoters themselves have a better understanding of the circumstances surrounding a project, the environmental conditions and the difficulties it may have to get ahead.
If finally these parks are discarded in the normal procedure, the promoters will not recover the economic guarantees (as long as it is not for reasons beyond their responsibility). For this reason, Aznar considers that “recovering the guarantee is an incentive to withdraw those most conflictive projects”.
Currently, the Ministry for the Ecological Transition is processing 697 renewable projects: 467 photovoltaic, 211 wind, two hydroelectric and 17 hybrid. They all add up to 66,000 MW, of which some 19,700 MW are in the environmental processing phase. However, these are only part of the applications submitted, those of the largest projects, since those with a power of less than 50 MW are processed by the autonomous communities.
“The high volume of requests supposes a very high workload for which the competent bodies, at all levels [Gobierno central, comunidades autónomas, confederaciones hidrográficas…], they were not adequately sized”, admits Aznar. “Beyond the traffic jam, this also generates other additional complexities, since in certain areas there tends to be a certain concentration —for example, due to proximity to connection points in the network—, which forces us to take into account the synergistic impacts, not just those of an isolated project but of several in the same area”.
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