Draft French renewable energy bill lacks ‘overall strategy’, critics say

Euractiv | Sep 21, 2022 at 6:07 PM
  • French President Emmanuel Macron will present a bill to accelerate the deployment of renewable energies at the Saint-Nazaire offshore wind farm on Thursday (22 September), despite critics who say the draft is falling short on ambition.
  • Among the proposed reforms, the government wants to simplify the procedure for granting permits to new projects as it takes “an average of five years of procedures to build a solar farm […], seven years for a wind farm and ten years for an offshore wind farm,” while other EU countries are often twice as fast.
  • However, without safeguards, this could weaken the opinions of the public and the bodies competent to look into such projects.