The Romanian president has gone on to pass a new law that goes on to simplify the permitting process when it comes to the development of renewable energy projects on buildable land. This move comes after the Romanian parliament adopted amendments to Law No. 50/1991 in January this year.
The said amendments thereby enabled PV, bioliquids, biomass, wind, storage projects, biomass, as well as transformer stations to be built on the agricultural land plots, which happen to be less than 50 hectares.
The government went on to do so by eradicating a requirement to embrace a zonal urban plan, which happened to be one of the most time-consuming stages in terms of the permitting process.
With Law No. 166.2023 already passed on June 10 this year, Romania is going ahead with the removal of the Zonal Urban Plan requirement when it comes to buildable land. It is well worth noting that project developers will also only need to get approval for all the building permits once.
In the past, developers who were looking to build a 130 MW project on a 130-hectare plot of land, for instance, would have had to split the entire project into three sections and also go ahead with applying for separate approvals for each part.
One of the partners at a law firm in Romania opined that apart from the exemption of the Zonal Urban Plan, the point is that just on the basis of an individual urbanism certificate, multiple projects can go on to get developed, which will in a way reduce bureaucracy and are also meant to make the permission process of large projects absolutely seamless. The new measures will go on to shorten the process of obtaining permission by a couple of months for renewable energy projects that are larger in size.