Since September 2021, eclareon, together with the Oeko-Institute, WindEurope and SolarPower Europe, has been implementing a project for the European Commission called “Technical support for RES policy development and implementation – Simplification of permission and administrative procedures for RES installations (RES SIMPLIFY)”.

As the name of the project already suggests, the key aim of this project is to facilitate and accelerate administrative and permitting procedures for the promoters and developers of renewable energy projects across EU Member States. The project comprises the following tasks:

• Mapping of administrative and permitting procedures for renewable energy technologies in EU Member States, Norway and Iceland and developing relevant performance indicators for Member State monitoring
• Member State monitoring and evaluation of the national administrative and permitting procedures based on the developed performance indicators and identification of good practice
• Dissemination and promotion of best practices
• An outline for the optimised processes and supporting IT infrastructure that are compliant with RED II
• Monitoring of RED II implementation in EU Member States and based on that, drafting of recommendations for policy initiatives at EU level

Currently, the project consortium is finalising the mapping of administrative and permitting procedures in all EU Member States, Norway and Iceland and is starting the validation stage of the preliminary research results. For validation purposes, validation & feedback workshops with the members of WindEurope and SolarPower Europe members took place in March and April respectively. Further workshops are planned in May with the representatives of small-scale hydropower (organised by EREF), and from geothermal (ESTIF) and solar thermal (EGEC) sectors. In the next step, the project team will outline the optimised processes and supporting IT infrastructure that are compliant with RED II and start monitoring the RED II implementation in the EU Member States and will start with the dissemination and promotion of best practices identified.