"1,961. That’s the number of documents contained within a single planning application for a wind farm off the northeast coast of England – capable of powering around 1.5 million homes. The environmental impact assessment and environmental scoping documents alone totaled 13,275 pages. To put that into context, that’s 144 pages longer than the complete works of Tolstoy combined with Proust’s seven-volume opus In Search of Lost Time.
This is by no means an outlier for the UK, nor much of the developed world. Developers must prepare mountains of documents to win approval to build new offshore wind farms, nuclear power stations, or transmission lines – the very things needed to keep the lights on and prevent disastrous rates of climate change. Uncertain, slow, and costly approval processes now represent the main barrier to clean energy, but this sclerotic status quo is neither inevitable nor effective.
EDF Energy had to produce 44,260 pages of environmental documentation for Sizewell C, a new nuclear power station to be built on the same site as two existing nuclear power stations in Suffolk, England. Somewhat surprisingly, relatively little of the environmental statement related to the risk of radiation and the disposal of nuclear waste. More ink was spilled on the impact to marine ecology.
As these are private companies applying for permissions, we lack data on the cost of going through this process. However, a Freedom of Information request from New Civil Engineer magazine recently revealed that the UK’s National Highways agency spent £267 million preparing a planning application to build a 23-kilometer road. The planning application, which featured 30,000-plus pages of environmental documentation, was the longest ever prepared."
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