As part of the EU Emergency Ordinance, which was adopted on December 19, 2022, the approval procedures for renewable energy installations are also to be accelerated in Germany. To this end, at the end of January 2023, the Federal Cabinet approved a draft formulation aid for implementing the Regulation EU 2022/2577 and forwarded to the Bundestag for a vote.
PV system construction also to be accelerated by EU emergency regulation
The EU emergency regulation allows member states to significantly accelerate the expansion of renewable energies through country-specific legislation. In addition to accelerated approval procedures for onshore and offshore wind power plants and a faster expansion of power lines, the Federal Cabinet's decision also aims to significantly shorten the approval procedures for photovoltaic systems. In general, the Federal Cabinet's draft stipulates that PV systems on commercial and industrial roofs and on "artificial structures" receive the necessary approval for PV expansion after three months at the latest.
Approval procedures should take a maximum of three months
It is also planned that Solar parks on these artificial structures, such as quarries, landfills or gravel pits, no longer require an incompatibility test in advance in order to be approved. Repowering - the replacement of existing photovoltaic systems with more efficient solar modules - and grid reinforcement measures are also to be made easier and the hurdles lowered. In both cases, the draft envisages that in future, instead of a complete incompatibility assessment, a difference assessment will be sufficient or, in the case of repowering measures, may even be omitted altogether in some cases.