The Spanish government gives three more years to build and start exploiting wind and solar photovoltaic projects

The Government opens its hand to avoid the suffocation of the renewable energy sector and, with it, the construction or even the banks, giving three more years so that the promoters of wind and photovoltaic parks have up to eight years and not five as until now to start exploiting them from the moment the process begins with an access license and connection to the electrical grid.
This was a claim from the renewable sector, which even warned of the collapse of construction and banks, which the Executive has included in the decree of anti-crisis measures that it approved this Wednesday.
The 2020 decree that determined the deadlines that promoters should meet to maintain their network connection and access rights will be modified, and to introduce a change in the last step, the one relating to when they will have to obtain the Administrative Exploitation Authorization that indicates that the park is now ready to come into operation and generate electricity with wind or photovoltaic energy.

The 2020 Law established that this license must be held no later than five years after the developer had obtained access to the network, which meant that they would only have a period of between 23 and 27 months from the start of construction, after of having had a positive environmental evaluation and having passed other administrative procedures. Now this five-year period is extended to eight years, so that the developers will have 36 more months to build the parks.

The Spanish Photovolaic Union (UNEF) has received with satisfaction this new extension, which is added to another mid-year extension to give six more months to the period that must elapse between environmental authorization and obtaining the license to start building, within of legislation that seeks to expedite renewable projects as much as possible, so that grid connection rights are not blocked by some that are not going to be carried out.

In this case, in the section that goes from the beginning of construction and the moment in which the wind or solar park must be ready to start operating, the sector had very little time for both the financial entities that must finance these projects how construction companies can carry them out and could assume such a workload.

The UNEF spoke of “collapse” and demanded two years, waiting for the Government to be formed again, which happened a few weeks ago. Finally, the Executive has given three more years, a decision that this association considers “definitive measures so that photovoltaic deployment can be done in an orderly manner by companies and with the necessary rigor by the administration.”