The more extensive and complicated the administrative procedures, the slower the development of renewable energy. Conversely, where unnecessary paperwork has been reduced, RES flourishes. Bureaucracy simply hinders the growth of renewable energy. Especially in such complex areas as the implementation of onshore and offshore wind power plants. The conclusion is simple: legislators should do their best to make the construction of green energy installations easier. This is important for all of us.
What does streamlining administrative procedures accomplish?
Recently, the Bloomberg agency published an interesting analysis on the situation of the RES market in Germany. The energy situation in the country became highly complicated especially after the start of the Russian war in Ukraine, when Germany gave up gas supplies from Russia. This opened up a number of problems in securing ongoing energy supplies, which in turn translated into a dynamization of work on RES development. One of the most interesting – and certainly worth following – ideas in this regard was the allocation of 2 percent of the land in each state precisely for the realization of green energy installations.
However, the real breakthrough came with the liberalization of regulations. Nowadays, administrative procedures related to the construction of RES – especially for wind and photovoltaic farms. Green energy has been recognized as an “overriding public interest,” and it is no longer necessary to complete documentation of about 36,000 pages to start building a wind farm. In fact, it’s hard to even imagine such an enormity of documents.
How long does it take to arrange RES permits?
In Poland, in the area of reducing unnecessary bureaucracy related to the implementation of wind farms, we also have a lot to do. It is difficult to determine in advance how much time must pass from the start of efforts to build a wind farm until its finalization, but it is usually a process of several years. If offices acted efficiently, and investors had to submit fewer documents to them, the process would certainly be much shorter. And given that we can’t do without RES, striving to de-formalize the investments discussed here remains an extremely important issue.