a bill to try to speed up
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It is a dense and dense document that the players in the sector are still in the process of analyzing. Distributed in mid-August, the bill on the acceleration of renewable energies, which provides for the simplification of administrative procedures to shorten project deployment times, must be presented by the end of September to the Council of Ministers, before being debated in Parliament. On Monday August 29, the National Council for Ecological Transition, one of the main bodies consulted on the text, met again to discuss it.
“Everyone agrees to accelerate the deployment of renewables in the face of the climate and energy supply emergency, explains Geoffroy Marx, who represented the League for the Protection of Birds (LPO). But the associations consider that there is a real risk of environmental regression, while some rather highlight the need to produce electricity at all costs. »
While France is the only country in the European Union not to have achieved its objectives in 2020, this bill should enable it to catch up and achieve the targets set by the Head of State: by beginning of the year, Emmanuel Macron has announced that he wants to connect fifty offshore wind farms by 2050, exceed 100 gigawatts (GW) of installed solar capacity and double that of onshore wind production.
The bill, hailed by the sector as an important political signal, consists of twenty articles grouped into four main chapters. The first brings together emergency measures presented as temporary, which can only be implemented for four years – i.e. until the end of the five-year term. Among these is the simplification of the compatibility of urban planning documents or the extension to more projects of public participation by electronic means.
Derogations
The text also provides that the thresholds above which projects are subject to an environmental assessment can be raised more easily. The government recalls that only wind farms with more than ten masts are assessed in Spain, and those with twenty masts in Germany. This measure, in particular, arouses the fear of nature protection organisations, which see in it the risk of a breach of the principle of non-regression of environmental law, enshrined in the biodiversity protection law of 2016.
The associations are also concerned about Article 6, according to which installations meeting certain criteria would be considered “of major public interest”, making it easier to obtain a derogation from the obligation to protect protected species. For the Union of Renewable Energies (SER), this provision is on the contrary important to shorten the deadlines. “Developers will not have an automatic exemption for protected species, there will always be other conditions to meet”says Alexandre Roesch, its general delegate.
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