EU urges Cyprus to hurry up renewable energy permits

The European Commission sent a letter of formal notice to Cyprus on Wednesday, calling on it to speed up its issuing of permission for renewable energy projects.

The letter said Cyprus must “transpose agreed rules to accelerate permitting procedures for renewable energy projects”, making reference to the European Union’s revised renewable energy directive which entered into force in November last year.

Cyprus was one of 26 EU member states to receive such a letter, with only Denmark having satisfied the commission on the matter thus far.

The directive stipulated that permission-giving procedures for renewable energy projects be both simplified and accelerated, with it being provided for in the legislation that “the necessary infrastructure projects” be implemented to “integrate the additional renewable energy into the electricity system.”

The commission said the legislation “also includes clear time limits for permit-granting procedures” and the creation of a “single contact point” for such procedures.

The letter comes just a day after Cyprus’ environment commissioner Antonia Theodosiou had described the country’s transition to renewable energy sources as “slow”.

She was keen to point out that the island “has abundant sunshine, which gives us huge opportunities to exploit solar energy as a sustainable alternative”.

Despite the availability of the natural resources, however, she said Cyprus’ transition to using them to generate electricity has been “slow”, which in turn “limits our ability to reduce carbon emissions”.

In addition to the letter about renewable energy projects, the commission sent letters of formal notice to 17 member states including Cyprus about their compliance with EU laws on corporate sustainability reporting.

This matter concerns four EU directives which relate to accounting, transparency, auditing, and corporate sustainability reporting which, in short, is the disclosure of non-financial performance information related to businesses.

The corporate sustainability reporting directive, the commission said, “requires large companies and listed companies to disclose information on the social and environmental risks they face, and on how their activities impact people and the environment.”

“This helps investors and other stakeholders to evaluate the sustainability performance of companies,” they said.