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The Government has announced initiatives to further streamline the environmental assessment process for renewable energy projects in South Africa.
This was announced by the Minister of Forestry, Fisheries, and the Environment, Barbara Creecy, during a virtual stakeholder engagement on Thursday.
Department spokesperson, Albi Modise, says these measures will improve the efficiency of the environmental assessment processes to facilitate the development of Solar PV and associated infrastructure in areas of low to medium environmental sensitivity.
He says the initiatives to be implemented will exempt developers from obtaining environmental authorisation for certain listed or specified activities for the development of solar facilities.
Modise said the Minister said that the two gazettes relating to this matter will be advertised for public comment in August.
"The registration process will reduce timeframes from 300 days and 147 days respectively to approximately 60 days from inception of the project," he said.
Modise said the Department "will be calling on members of the public to make inputs to make sure that the process of relaxing those requirements of environmental assessments are inclusive of the consent, but also understands the precarious situation of energy security in South Africa."
