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The chief executive of French waste and water group Veolia has urged European governments to do more to cut red tape on permits to speed up renewable energy projects.
Estelle Brachlianoff made the plea as Veolia aims to produce 300 megawatts of electricity from solar panels mounted across its closed landfills in France, enough to power a town of 130,000 people, in its first large-scale attempt to reconvert the sites.
One of the obstacles to a rapid rollout of solar farms in France and elsewhere across Europe is finding land to install the panels.
Using the landfill sites Veolia already owns or operates is one solution, but a series of permits are still needed, from fauna and flora controls to construction authorisations.
Veolia’s solar plan for 40 different projects will cost about €250mn and is part of a €4bn investment the company is making to expand its energy activities as it doubles spending in the sector between now and 2030.
It also aims to bring financial partners — from local investors to banks — into the solar projects.
The speed at which permitting authorisations are granted means that Veolia’s solar panels could take four years to get connected to the power grid, which Brachlianoff said was too slow.
It was also penalising Europe at a time when clean energy subsidies through Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act were helping US businesses, she added.
“Everyone is trying to do renewable energy as quickly as possible and we’re not asking for subsidies here,” Brachlianoff said in an interview.
“We’re not talking about sensitive sites in the middle of a city. So for me, this is a perfect example of how we might be able to figure things out so that we can move faster. As things stand today, you have to ask for different authorisations one after the other.”
Veolia, which traces its origins back to the 19th century as a water service company, makes roughly a quarter of its annual revenues from energy on sales that reached nearly €43bn in 2022. It is yet to publish results for the whole of last year.
Energy was Veolia’s fastest-growing division in the first half of 2023, a year after it completed its near €13bn acquisition of many of the activities of longtime French rival Suez following a bitter takeover battle.
The group’s energy activities are largely aimed at using existing resources such as capturing excess heat from industrial processes or burning non-recyclable waste.
Its focus on the sector is partly aimed at providing efficiency measures in buildings to save energy, which more and more companies are doing.
This fits with Brachlianoff’s plan to grow a market in utilising unused local energy reserves, including bioenergy and power produced from waste, which she said could provide up to 400 gigawatts of power in Europe as the region tries to become energy independent.
“That’s huge. It’s the equivalent to the energy demand of the whole of Italy. It’s a third of all European fossil fuel imports,” she said.
“When public authorities ask us what we need to go faster (on energy), they expect us to say money. The answer is not money . . . it’s the rhythm, the authorisations, the delays,” she added.
The group will use the electricity from the projects for its own plants and operations as well as offering it to other companies and local authorities. It already operates a standalone solar farm on a restored landfill site in Essex in Britain.
