If you want a quick decision on your wind farm application, Finland is the place to be according to a new survey released this month.
The European Wind Energy Association looked at the number of months it took for authorities to consider wind farm proposals across 22 countries. Finland has the quickest decision makers with an average time in planning of just over 8 months. Portugal is the slowest with a painful 58 months, closely followed by Spain with 57 months.
UK decisions take on average 26 months – quicker than France, Germany, Denmark, Netherlands and Sweden.
Justin Wilkes, EWEA Policy Director said: “If Europe is serious about reaching 20% renewables by 2020 some member states need to streamline their consent procedures for wind farms. There are a number of actions all Member States could take: creating a one stop shop approach for contacting the different authorities, writing clear guidelines for developers, and introducing better and streamlined spatial planning procedures. Implementation of the Renewable Energy Directive provides a real opportunity for targeted action in certain EU countries,”.
Despite UK decision making being faster than average what really matters is the final answer – consent or refusal. What could have been usefully looked at in the survey is the proportion of applications that result in being consented and eventually built.
Aaron Stewart
July 11th, 2010
actually it is not that hard to setup wind farms, the only problem is that it requires lots of capital investment.’”.
Mary Griffin
August 3rd, 2010
wind farms are great but they also take up a large land area’.”
Electric Cement Mixer :
October 25th, 2010
our hometown already have wind farms and it is great to know that we have a reneawable electricity source,,`