There was almost no controversy about one goal in the election campaign: acceleration of planning.

The unanimous complaint is that it takes far too much time in Germany until major projects such as wind farms, power lines and railway lines are approved.

The grand coalition launched four planning acceleration laws in the last legislative period without any resounding success.

Helene Bubrowski

Political correspondent in Berlin.

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The energy transition, a central promise of the traffic light parties, is now at stake.

In the explorations, you have already agreed that two percent of the country's area will be devoted to wind power, but the plants must also be built.

The SPD, Greens and FDP write in the exploratory paper: “We are making it our common mission to drastically accelerate the expansion of renewable energies and to remove all hurdles and obstacles.

We will speed up the planning and approval process considerably. ”The first negotiating group headed by Thomas Kutschaty (SPD), Britta Haßelmann (Greens) and Konstantin Kuhle (FDP) will deal with the project from this Wednesday on.

How should it work?

Can the legal process be limited?

Experienced administrative lawyers shrug their shoulders.

"We are walled in by a large number of regulations, and there is little we can do about them," says Wolfgang Ewer, who as a lawyer has overseen numerous large-scale projects.

The public debate revolves primarily around the question of whether and how one can restrict the legal process.

Citizens' initiatives and environmental associations, but also individual citizens, have the right to defend themselves in court against the approval of a wind turbine and can thus delay or even stop construction.

The Union has therefore called for the right to classify actions to be restricted.

From Ewer's point of view, the hope of achieving a lot along the way is a "chimera".

Not only does the Basic Law guarantee legal recourse against onerous decisions by the administration, the hurdles set up by Union law and international law in the form of the Aarhus Convention are even higher. The federal government has just learned this painfully: The house of Transport Minister Andreas Scheuer (CSU) had worked out a reform, according to which individual major projects will in future be approved by law. If you want to defend yourself, you can only turn to the Federal Constitutional Court.

The EU Commission sees this as a violation of the Environmental Impact Assessment Directive and has initiated infringement proceedings.

Indeed, the directive lays down the right to review.

In the end, further proposals to change procedural law are unlikely to be feasible: judicial control cannot generally be limited to checking whether a decision is justifiable.

Shortening the number of instances would not be of much use either;

The route to the Federal Administrative Court has already been opened for many major projects.

Lawyer sees the main problem in European environmental law

The Kiel lawyer Ewer sees the main problem in European environmental law, which the authorities have to examine before granting a permit.

"When interpreting the directives, new questions constantly arise, and the European Court of Justice has set the scope for transposition into national law to practically zero."

Example from species protection, for which the Flora-Fauna-Habitat Directive is relevant: A wind turbine may not be built if the risk of killing birds due to a collision is significantly increased.

But when is that the case?

Do you have to think away from a wind turbine?

Or also the wind turbines that are a few hundred meters away?

That is unclear, as is the question of whether an exception under species protection law may be granted for reasons of climate protection.

And then there is the European Bird Protection Directive: How does the wind farm affect the breeding and nesting behavior of certain bird species?

What about the moulting sites of migratory birds?