Both environmental studies and local plans for Denmark's largest land-based wind farm, Thorup-Sletten, have been cancelled by the Planning Appeals Board.
However, it has taken 28 months for the Planning Appeals Board to conclude that the project does not take sufficient account of bird life in a nearby area.
And this has been met with great criticism from the industry organization Wind Denmark, which finds it indecent that the case processing has taken almost two and a half years and the decision includes knowledge that the project owners have not been able to take into account, since the EIA study was prepared according to all applicable rules when the project was approved by the municipal councils.
- When you, as a wind turbine installer, prepare an EIA, it is done on the best knowledge basis available at the time. That a new knowledge base or a new way of interpreting regulations may emerge during a complaint case that is far too long is, above all, critical and very surprising, says Lea Bigom Wichmand, chief consultant at Wind Denmark and continues:
- It is positive that as a Dane you can complain, but it is unreasonable that those who are being complained about have their cases dragged out over several years and at the same time do not know whether the basis on which the complaints are processed will change along the way. These are conditions that no investor can live with and yet another problem that renewable energy installers must deal with.
Calls for political action
Lea Bigom Wichmand believes that the current practice calls for political action. So there can be clearer guidelines for which rules wind turbine installers must deal with.
- This is not reasonable administrative practice, and it calls for political intervention and a clearer set of rules. If the appeals board had met its own targets for case processing time, Eurowind might have been successful in the appeal case or could have taken the objections into account. It seems a bit Kafkaesque, and completely unacceptable, that it is its own slowness that helps decide the appeal cases, she says.
In connection with the climate agreement in June last year, the Planning Appeals Board was allocated an additional DKK 15 million annually in the period 2021-2024 to set a cap on case processing times for renewable energy projects of six months.
In the 2020 Finance Act, an additional DKK 5 million was allocated annually in 2020 and 2021 to settle cases concerning wind and solar projects from before 2020, before the end of 2021.
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