The New South Wales Government has announced a new Renewable Energy Planning Framework to promote faster planning decisions, provide investment certainty for industry and host communities, and boost economic benefits for regional communities.
The framework includes a suite of guidelines and tools that will play an important role in supporting the NSW Government’s legislated Electricity Infrastructure Roadmap and emissions reduction targets.
While there is broad support for renewable energy across the state, there have increasingly been calls from local communities for greater certainty and transparency from Government on how renewable projects will be assessed and managed over their lifecycle.
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In response to these calls and the recommendations of the Electricity Supply and Reliability Check Up, the new Renewable Energy Planning Framework includes five new and updated guidelines:
- Wind Energy Guidelines—provides advice on planning considerations relevant to wind energy development, including visual impacts, site selection and decommissioning.
- Transmission Guidelines—addresses route selection, community consultation expectations and visual impact assessment.
- Solar Energy Guidelines—revisions to the existing guideline to provide additional advice on decommissioning and incorporate other aspects of the Framework.
- Benefit Sharing Guidelines—encourages equitable and sustainable distribution of benefits to local communities.
- Private Agreement Guidelines—advises landholders and renewable energy developers on key considerations when negotiating commercial agreements for hosting renewable energy projects.
The Framework introduces setbacks to avoid significant visual impacts from wind energy and transmission infrastructure, updates requirements for assessing hypothetical dwellings and establishes the government’s expectations for how benefits from renewable energy projects will flow directly to regions.
In addition to the framework and supporting guidelines, the NSW Government has released the Renewable Energy Transition Update to summarise progress on government actions to deliver a clean, affordable and reliable energy system.
The announcement was welcomed by the Clean Energy Council.
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“The guidelines released today will play a crucial role in ensuring wind and solar farms in NSW are assessed in a timely manner, helping the state to maintain a reliable electricity supply,” Clean Energy Council policy director energy generation and storage Dr Nicholas Aberle said.
“Clearer guidelines create a more predictable process for the companies seeking to build renewable energy projects as well as for the communities where these projects are proposed to be built, which is a win-win.
“We consider that the published guidelines strike a reasonable balance that should ensure well-designed projects will have a smooth assessment process while providing a clear framework for how impacts need to be managed.”
