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 ordering 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 take 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 platform Kiss of the Wolf 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 It has already received a blow from the Galician Justice that stopped the repowering (process to modernize existing parks and install others with a 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 autochthonous Greenalia y May were the first and, more recently, the Galician court knocked down naturgy the administrative authorization for the construction of a wind farm in Lugo, as reported by this medium.
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 security” to knock down the gas company’s project, understanding that what the plaintiff association requested was equivalent to what was claimed in the Greenalia cases and Engasa and, therefore, the magistrates concluded that they should “follow now 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 developers have activated their legal teams to undertake a extraordinary appeal to the Supreme Courtwhich 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.