In a push to speed up the expansion of renewables in Portugal, the federal government has launched a bundle that can scale back environmental assessments for photo voltaic tasks.
Photo voltaic tasks that require an space lower than or equal to 100 hectares for the set up of panels and inverters will not be required to have a obligatory environmental evaluation.
A case by case examine for photo voltaic PV tasks can even be eradicated for tasks that occupy lower than 15 hectares, are no less than 2km away from photo voltaic crops of greater than 1MW and require the grid connection to be made by means of a 60kV line (or much less) and with an extension of lower than 10km.
The bundle of measures – the majority of that are set to come back into impact on 1 March 2023 – is designed to cut back paperwork for renewable tasks, supporting Portugal’s goal to achieve 80% of electrical energy manufacturing from renewables by 2026, in keeping with Portuguese Prime Minister António Costa.
Costa, stated: “We intend to speed up the power transition, intensify the financial system’s decarbonisation, speed up the round financial system and scale back day after day paperwork of the Public administration with residents.”
This isn’t the primary time the Portuguese authorities has waived environmental influence research this yr to spur growth, having completed so for photo voltaic PV tasks beneath 50MW in March to help the identical effort to achieve the 80% of renewables goal by 2026.
Inside the first half of the yr the nation put in extra photo voltaic capability than the entire of 2021 with 578MW of photo voltaic PV added by means of 31 July 2022, because of this measure.
Furthermore, beneath sure circumstances it’s going to not be required to do an environmental evaluation when altering the gear or the put in capability of a undertaking.
Inexperienced hydrogen tasks can even be coated by the brand new bureaucracy-reducing measures, and can see their environmental evaluation waived in a transfer to extend manufacturing. Portugal expects to achieve 2GW of electrolysis manufacturing by 2030.
One other measure that can scale back paperwork for renewable tasks is the removing of the necessity to renew the environmental licence that lasts for ten years.
