The Greek Regulatory Authority for Energy (R.A.E.) with its communication dated January 27th, 2010, proceeds to an article by article comment on the Bill for the “Acceleration of the Development of Renewable Energy Sources and Climate Change” regarding the three stages of the licensing procedure for projects on Renewable Energy Sources (R.E.S.) (namely the electricity production licence, the approval of environmental terms, and the installation licence).
Τhe applicant’s technical and financial competence and the project’s energy performance are set as primary selection criteria whereas the acceleration of the procedure will be accomplished, inter alia, by:
- Non-application of the principle of time priority during the first stage of the licensing. procedure (electricity production licence) and transferring this to the stage of approval of environmental terms.
- Deactivating in public domain areas the clause for temporary block of the installation area of the proposed project.
- Eliminating the preliminary examination of the terms of the network connection.
- Disclosure of blocked zones on a public registry.
R.A.E. presents an interesting approach regarding special licensing cases due to a limited margin of the network’s development in an already saturated area. To this end, R.A.E. proposes revised criteria of comparative assessment, with their specification by the Authority targeting the selection of viable projects with swift implementation potential. Furthermore, within the framework of a broader policy to attract projects on R.E.S., the Regulatory Authority proposes, inter alia, the alleviation of the applicant’s inconvenience, while still taking care of protecting the environment. However, a proposal of extending the deadline of the administration’s prescribed period of assessment of the application for the energy production licence to three months seems to work contrary to the aforementioned tendency, since this extension discourages the investor from the very beginning of the operations.