The government has taken advantage of the decree approved yesterday with anti-crisis measures to introduce new regulations, such as the one on business shields and others with respect to energy. One very relevant one is that, to avoid “speculation”, says the decree, a moratorium of 18 months has been imposed on all those projects that are processing renewable permits but without the most basic one: access to the electricity backbone, the high voltage grid, which is managed by REE (Redeia group).
As of today, this company has a total of 170,000 megawatts of wind and photovoltaic power that do not yet have a grid access point. These megawatts are only a project on paper. Despite this, the megawatts are being bought and sold by their developers in an unbridled financial race.
Access points are the key to their realisation. But the chances of getting one are limited. From now on, they will be put out to tender, rather than being awarded on a first-come, first-served basis. The chances of all the projects now being bought and sold in the sector coming to fruition are limited. Despite this, all of them are still processing the rest of the permits, such as building, environmental and start-up licences, which causes a bureaucratic bottleneck.
With the moratorium, the government is trying to kill two birds with one stone. First, it is attempting a massive screening of projects, leaving only those that really want to go ahead, and eliminating those that are pure speculation. By eliminating thousands of projects, it alleviates the bureaucratic saturation that the administration now suffers.
“In order to grant access to renewable generation and storage in an orderly manner, there are almost two hundred and ninety nodes of the transmission grid that are reserved for access competition,” says the decree, published today in the BOE. As reported in the daily Expansión
“At the moment, the order is in its final stages of processing the order that will call for competition in some of these nodes. Although the order has not yet been approved, the drafts submitted to the hearing process envisaged a favourable score for those projects that put the facilities into service in the shortest possible time”.
The “expectations generated by this order mean that speculative movements are being observed on the part of certain agents who are initiating the first steps in the procedures without giving them continuity, with the aim of blocking sites to other agents who are really interested in developing renewable projects”, the regulation adds. “These actions have led in recent months to an increase in the number of guarantees and requests for administrative authorisations and requests for environmental documents.
“These previous movements are detrimental to the agents really interested in building renewable generation facilities for the population where the facilities are located and for the administrations. For the agents because they are blocking sites with a high renewable resource by agents who are not interested in building the projects. For the company where the project is located because procedures are initiated for a number of projects that neither the grid, nor the area, nor the area, from the grid, nor the area, nor the area, are interested in. For all these reasons, article 13 of the decree establishes that “exceptionally, for a period of 18 months from the entry into force of this Royal Decree-Law, in those nodes in which the Secretary of State for Energy has resolved to hold a tender for access capacity, the procedures that the promoters have initiated before the competent body” to request access permits will be suspended. The “social and environmental benefits can be absorbed”.
