The wind farms will resort to the Supreme Court the slowdown of the Galician TSJ to their parks

The battle of the Galician wind power is about to reach Madrid. The trickle of sentences that the Superior Court of Justice of Galicia (TSXG) has handed down in recent months, issuing the suspension of administrative authorizations for wind farms granted by the Xunta, has put renewable developers on guard who are already working with their legal teams to bring cases to the Supreme Court.

The prosecution of the wind farms in the Galician territory has occurred as a result of complaints from regional environmental groups, mainly two, the Petón do Lobo platform and the Association for the Ecological Defense of Galicia (Adega).. The second threatened to take legal action with some thirty projects promoted in the region, something that has set off alarm bells in the wind industry given the alignment with the clamor of environmentalists that the Chamber of the Galician TSJ that judges these processes has maintained.

In January 2022, the electric company of Portuguese origin EDP already received a blow from the Galician Justice that stopped the repowering (process to modernize existing parks and install others with greater capacity) of one of its wind farms. But in recent months there has been an escalation of complaints by these activist groups that have resulted in one judicial setback after another for the promoters. The native companies Greenalia and Engasa were the first and, more recently, the Galician court overturned Naturgy's administrative authorization to build a wind farm in Lugo, as this media reported.

The ruling against Naturgy is precisely the one that worries the wind sector the most. And it is that in it the Galician court appealed to the “principle of equality” and “legal certainty” to knock down the gas company's project, understanding that what the plaintiff association requested was equivalent to what was claimed in the cases of Greenalia and Engasa and, therefore, the magistrates concluded that they should “now follow the same solution”. In short, an argument that, if maintained, will mean the systematic halt of all the parks that come to court.

With this background, several promoters have activated their legal teams to undertake an extraordinary appeal before the Supreme Court, which is known as an appeal, since the TSXG has dismissed the appeals that these companies have been filing against the precautionary suspension of the administrative and environmental permits for their parks.

In the sector it has drawn attention that the Galician court is going over the authorizations granted by the Xunta, ultimately contravening an administrative act. It's not common. For example, when on January 25 hundreds of renewable projects had to accredit the environmental impact declaration (DIA), some of those that did not succeed appealed the negative DIA in the courts.. The general criterion of the autonomous courts was to give priority to the administrative act and not declare the precautionary measures requested by the promoters so as not to immediately lose their access points to the network.

The climate of tension that exists around the windmills in Galicia, the fourth autonomous region by installed wind power, has long dominated the business debate. In the last sectoral forum organized by the Wind Energy Association (AEE) in Madrid at the end of June, Jorge Barredo, Naturgy's general director of Renewables, anticipated: “The judicialization is going to bring down permits and it is going to go further and further.”

PREPA entered the debate last week when it published a statement in which it criticized the situation in the region: “Some anti-wind collectives, protected by interpretations of the law, lead to the structural blockade of the relevant efforts, delaying the processes sine die and eliminating any certainty for companies that have to invest in the territory”.

According to ESA estimates, the one-year delay in the processing of a 50 MW wind farm in Galicia (similar dimensions to the one that has paralyzed Naturgy) has a cost for the Galician and Spanish economy of 77.1 million euros. Among the impacts calculated by the wind power association is a cut of 2.8 million during the first year in income for municipalities, the Xunta and the tenants of the land where the park is located, as well as 734,000 euros per year in collections in the following 25 years.