How Spain eliminated environmental impact assessments for most renewable projects
Progress is possible
A few weeks ago, I looked at solar farms in the UK and noticed the strange fact that more often than not they produce exactly 49MW of energy.
Coincidentally, 49.9MW is the largest a solar farm can be without being designated as a Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project and getting dragged into the Development Consent Order (DCO) regime. The DCO regime was intended to be a fast-track alternative to seeking consents from local councils, but in practice the process has grown unwieldy.
Britain Remade’s analysis of data on major infrastructure demonstrates the growth in planning red tape. In the space of a decade, document counts have tripled while almost half of all decisions are delayed. Britain’s economy may not have grown much over the past decade, but the same cannot be said of the length of environmental impact assessments and environmental statements. In fact, 10,000 plus page counts are common for renewable projects.
As a consequence, building a new solar farm can take 4 years and a new offshore wind farm can take more than 12 years. In normal times, this state of affairs would be inconvenient. But we are not in normal times, Europe is in an energy crisis and climate deadlines are fast approaching.
Now, there is nothing inevitable about it taking longer to permit and build a single offshore wind farm than it took to propose, design, and build the National Grid. Just as there was nothing inevitable about it taking 13 years to approve a safe and effective vaccine.
The rapid development and rollout of multiple coronavirus vaccines showed that it is possible to dramatically compress regulatory approval timelines without compromising on safety. It also highlighted how rules that fail to pass any plausible cost-benefit analysis have a tendency to accumulate. Remember, the reports in January 2021 of vaccine volunteers being forced to complete an online course on preventing radicalisation – a difficult task when you consider vaccinators will spend a minute at most with any patient.
If the Energy Price Guarantee is 2023’s version of furlough, the question we need to ask is where is 2023’s vaccine taskforce. Admittedly, there are some promising signs – it was reported this week that Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has announced a review into speeding up the approval of major projects. But let’s face it, a review does not exactly match the urgency of the times we are living in.
Compare the announcement of yet another review with what Spain’s been up to. While the rest of us were enjoying our Christmas break, on December 27th Spain passed a Royal Decree which temporarily eliminated the requirement to carry out environmental impact assessments for renewables projects in large parts of the country.
The new rules, which are in place until 2024, allow 150mw solar farms and 75mw wind farms to bypass the normal environmental assessment process provided a few conditions are met:
Grid connection lines are not more than 15km in length or exceed 220kV
Authorities do not lodge an objection to the project within two months
Projects are in areas with low or moderate environment sensitivity
This approach is anticipated to have a major impact on solar deployment. The independent Energy Transitions Commission estimates it will halve project development times for solar projects from four to two years. And since the measures were first announced in April, Bloomberg New Energy Finance have upgraded their 2030 forecast of solar deployment in Spain by 13GW from 73GW to 86GW.
There are two major lessons for policymakers in the UK to learn from Spain’s approach.
Rules of Positive Silence
Under the status quo in the UK, renewable developers have to provide a mountain of paperwork by default. Spain’s approach flips that by only requiring environmental assessments in cases where a planning authority explicitly raises concerns about the project. In my mind, this has two key merits.
First, a number of developers in the UK have complained to me about bureaucratic inertia with valuable projects unable to get off the ground because the Environmental Agency can’t issue permits in a timely fashion. A Spanish-style rule of positive silence would ensure that agency foot dragging is no longer a barrier.
Second, under the status quo carrying out an environmental impact assessment is the norm even when projects are highly likely to be net beneficial to the environment. This would ensure that expensive and time-consuming environmental studies are only needed when there’s a reasonable likelihood they might find something that will lead to the project being rejected or forced to make changes. For instance, in most cases solar farms not only provide low carbon electricity, they also boost biodiversity by removing land from intensive use and restoring grassland. One recent solar farm approved in South Norfolk delivered a staggering 273% net gain in biodiversity. It simply does not make sense for projects of a similar nature to spend years preparing environmental statements.
Sharing data can cut bureaucracy
The UK has historically been a leader in the sharing of public data. TfL’s public API was a big part of the reason CityMapper started in London rather than Paris or Berlin. But one area where the UK lags behind is in publishing environmental and geospatial data. Spain on the other hand built a new zoning tool in early 2021 using pre-existing EU environmental data and energy generation data to identify the best sites to place renewables. The maps divide land into five categories based on their environmental sensitivity.
The tool wasn’t originally intended to replace environmental impact assessments, but to merely guide decision making. However, when the energy crisis hit and there was a clear need to accelerate the transition to natural gas alternatives such as wind and solar, the maps were used to bypass the EIA process for land in the two lowest grades (Low and Moderate).
It is worth stressing that Spain’s approach isn’t about trading off environmental protection for speed. Rather, it is about frontloading necessary data-collection. At the moment, a major flaw in the environmental impact assessment process is that each developer must produce their own data. Better collection and sharing of data from environmental agencies should prevent unnecessary duplication of effort.
What works in Spain could work here too
There is no obvious reason why the UK couldn’t adopt the Spanish approach. Most, if not all, of the data Spain is using to streamline the development process exists for the UK too. Building a similar tool to speed up renewable deployment would be a modest expense compared to the £25bn plus spent this Winter subsidising every household's energy bills.
A common justification for Brexit is the idea that Britain could reform unwieldy regulations and move faster outside the EU. But it’s worth noting that the EU’s put forward a plan (RePowerEU), featuring proposals to slash approval times for renewables by granting fast-track planning permission in areas where environmental risks are low. Yet while the EU is reforming planning for energy projects, the UK is seeing more and more energy projects delayed – Hornsea Four, a wind farm off the east coast of England, merely the latest.
As the lawyer Mustafa Latif-Aramesh recently put it in The Times: “We’re becoming more EU than the EU.”
So if energy security and net zero really are priorities for the Government then they will need to find ways to cut down lengthy development timelines. It isn’t enough to set ambitious targets and rename departments, you actually have to get stuff built.
With all due respect, you should come to Spain (where I am) to assess whether the claims you are making about the benefits of eliminating EIA for renewable projects are true. NGO's are springing up all around the country like mushrooms after this "renewables" rain in a desperate attempt to protect our vulnerable rural ecosystems and endangered species, humans included, as these projects rob people of their livelihood (agriculture, tourism, fishing) in addition to destroying the landscape (that we are supposed to protect according to the Landscape Convention). And we don't even have a say, as RED III did away with public participation right enshrined in the Aarhus Convention, on top of scrapping nature protection we are supposed to ensure according to the Birds and Habitats Directives, and the landscape protection outlined in the Landscape Convention. You should come and and see at least one enormous solar farm built in a picture-perfect Spanish valley where olive trees were cut down to make room for black panels. You should check how dead everything is under and around these enormous farms. You should look into how promoters manipulate the law by splitting one big project into several smaller ones to access this simplified permitting procedure. You should watch documentaries and read scientific papers by local and foreign scientists who describe all the horrendous environmental and socioeconomic impacts of these monstrous wind and solar farms on our land and in our sea. Basically, do some research and take field trips to get your facts straight, before spreading misinformation and encouraging more of this barbarian treatment of nature and people.