According to the National Audit Office, as of now, it is relatively doubtful that Estonia will achieve the goal set by 2030 of producing at least as much electricity from renewable sources in Estonia as the total amount of electricity consumed in Estonia during the year.
The Ministry of Climate and the Ministry of Regional Affairs and Agriculture have somewhat accelerated the construction of wind farms, but these measures do not significantly speed up the procedures for planning and environmental impact assessments, which have already started earlier and which have the greatest impact on achieving the goal set for 2030.
It is necessary for the Ministry of Climate to be able to find and implement effective measures for a fast-paced and without excessive administrative burden of new wind farm plans and environmental impact assessment procedures, to minimize the risk of litigation.
In 2022, the Riigikogu adopted an amendment to the Act on the Organization of the Energy Economy, which sets the goal of achieving the production of renewable electricity by 2030 in a volume that makes up at least 100 percent of the total final consumption of electricity. In 2022, renewable electricity accounted for 32 percent of the electricity consumed in Estonia, i.e. less than a third of the national target for renewable energy has been met to date.
In order to utilize wind energy, which is considered to be the source of renewable energy with the greatest potential in the region, no major wind farms have been added to Estonia in the last ten years. Only in recent years have steps been taken to remove obstacles and simplify processes to speed up the construction of wind farms.
The audit report of the National Audit Office points out a number of problems and risks that continue to slow down the development of onshore wind farms and make the achievement of the renewable electricity goal doubtful – for example, the duration of planning and environmental impact assessment procedures and problems when connecting to the grid. Unlike the National Audit Office, the Ministry of Climate considers the goal achievable and is optimistic.
Auditor General Janar Holm said that it is extremely important to treat wind energy not as a thing or a goal in itself, but to look at it in the overall context of electricity production and consumption in Estonia.
“The goal of creating more renewable energy capacity can be isolated, out of context, and taken narrowly, if it is not done in parallel with the promotion of storage capacities, increasing the permeability of the electricity grid and creating export prerequisites, because if the national goal is met or even close to the goal, the production capacity of renewable energy in Estonia would be many times more than the predicted peak consumption . Also, when setting and implementing renewable energy goals, it should be thoroughly analyzed and decided in the near future what place nuclear energy will have in Estonia’s energy portfolio in the future,” he noted.
In the case of external connections, it must be taken into account that electricity does not only flow out of Estonia, but also flows into Estonia under the conditions of an open electricity market – if the wind blows in Estonia, the wind will most likely also blow in the immediate neighbors, and the neighbors will also produce a larger amount of wind energy at exactly the same time. This means that the creation of external connections gives an opportunity to export excess electricity, but at the same time, their establishment in windy times also increases the supply of wind energy in Estonia.
When establishing external connections with neighboring countries, the actual possibility of exporting electricity also depends on whether our neighboring countries themselves also create additional connections to the following countries.
If storage solutions are not created and issues related to external connections are not resolved, then we will have many times more potential power than consumption in some hours, and therefore electricity production in some wind turbines will have to be stopped. And if the capacities are not used for work, but the fixed costs of investments are distributed over the amount of electricity produced, it means that as electricity consumers we pay for this unused capacity in one way or another.
“We will also pay if the price guarantees given to producers to encourage the implementation of renewable energy projects turn out to be too generous and significantly exceed the future market price. Therefore, more power for generating electricity does not automatically mean cheaper electricity. The consumer gets electricity at a reasonable price when the optimal balance point between demand and supply is reached,” said Holm.
“I also emphasize what I pointed out in the 2023 annual report to the Riigikogu – in the event that after 2030 the planned amount of renewable energy is added, Estonia has enough electricity production capacity, but there is a lack of controlled production capacity. However, controllable production capacities are needed, among other things, to ensure the frequency of the electricity grid. The necessary choices and decisions to ensure manageable capacity must be made as soon as possible,” he added.
According to Holm, this means that in the coming years we have to deal with major developments in energy in parallel with the diversity of the entire energy system, which concerns different sources, networks, connections and storage.
Ministries have taken steps to improve wind farm planning processes and speed up environmental impact assessment (EIA), but the changes have less impact than necessary on meeting the goal set for 2030.
Although changes were made in 2023 to speed up the main procedural instrument for the planning of wind farms – the special planning of local governments (for example, the requirement to prepare a detailed solution in the plan was waived, the number of requests for proposals in the procedure was reduced), these changes do not allow speeding up most of the wind energy special plans that have advanced further in the procedure.
Most of the special plans are already at a stage where the use of new possibilities would mean that certain stages of the procedure would have to be repeated, which in turn would mean that these procedures would be slowed down. At the same time, the temporal victory of abandoning the detailed solution stage of the plan is still not clear, because according to the impact assessors, it is not certain whether it can be implemented in practice.
The ministries have also implemented measures to speed up the environmental impact assessment of wind farms. An exception to the shorter environmental impact assessment for onshore wind power plants has been created (according to which no environmental impact assessment procedure has been carried out so far) and the requirements for environmental impact assessment experts and lead experts have been relaxed, which should bring in the missing experts with assessment licenses.
The procedure for the strategic assessment of the environmental impact of the special planning of local governments has also been shortened. The changes, which concern the program of strategic assessment of the environmental impact of the special planning of local governments, give a time gain of only about one to two months.
Environmental impact assessment is usually the most time-consuming stage in the development of wind farms, which can be made even faster without losing the quality of the assessment. However, the state authorities do not have an agreement on what is the acceptable environmental impact of wind farms and what are the significant impacts. Because of this, the procedures for assessing the environmental impact of wind farms are delayed, or the development and research of wind farms in areas with favorable wind conditions remain uninitiated.
The lack of data on the state of the environment is still a problem, which means an additional waste of time and money. Since there is generally no high-quality and up-to-date information on the environmental conditions of wind farm planning areas, extensive studies have become a part of every impact assessment.
There is also no overview of the studies related to wind farms and the data collected as part of monitoring, which makes it impossible to shorten the environmental impact assessment procedures to a greater extent. Creating an overview of studies would give impact assessment experts the opportunity to reduce the volume of conducting new studies and harmonize the assessment methodology.
The views of the Ministry of Economy and Communications on how to support the development of wind energy and achieve the goals of renewable electricity have been controversial.
In a short period of time, the Ministry has been of the opinion that the probability of success of onshore wind farms is low and insufficient to achieve the renewable electricity goals set for 2030, but also found that only onshore wind farms, which no longer need support, can cover Estonia’s need for renewable electricity. At the same time, in 2023, a tender aimed at onshore wind and hybrid farms was carried out, which gives producers a price guarantee.
The Ministry of Climate has expressed the opinion to the National Audit Office that in order to achieve the goal of renewable energy, the opportunities for wind energy production on land should be used first, and offshore wind farms are important to cover the increasing electricity consumption after 2030.
According to the National Audit Office, the European Union’s recovery and resilience plan REPowerEU, allocated to accelerate the development of renewable energy, is planned to provide support for activities that are not essential for the promotion of renewable energy, in addition to necessary activities.
The money is planned to be allocated, for example, to the purchase of equipment, the connection to the acceleration of renewable energy is indirect, since the equipment that collects spatial data is not needed for the construction of wind farms. The plan is to support the creation of jobs related to land operations and compensate for the costs of deforestation, but the jobs for which money is requested will only become necessary after the plans are approved, i.e. in 2026-2027.
REPowerEU money, which is a total of 32 million euros, can only be used until the first quarter of 2026, however, the activities necessary to achieve the goals need to be carried out at least until 2030 and beyond. Some of the activities outlined by the ministry have a long-term effect on the acceleration of renewable energy projects, but these effects may not be manifested before 2030.
The National Audit Office recommends that the Ministry of Regional Affairs and Agriculture, in cooperation with the parties, solve the practical issues in planning and environmental impact assessment procedures, which cause confusion and waste time for municipalities and slow down the procedures.
In order to make the assessment of the environmental impact of wind farms more efficient and faster and to enable finding suitable areas for the construction of wind farms, the National Audit Office recommends that the Ministry of Climate, in cooperation with the Environmental Board, impact assessors and experts, agree on the limits of acceptable negative environmental impact and the most important impacts to be assessed, and their assessment methodologies. Also, the information of the conducted studies and the environmental monitoring and follow-up data must be gathered in one place, which would enable the environmental impact assessment procedures to be accelerated.
Estonia’s success in meeting the goal of renewable energy production depends on how the initiated measures are implemented and what additional measures the Ministry of Climate will implement in the coming years. All measures planned so far have not started yet.
Wind farms are planned in a total of 31 municipalities in Estonia. For this purpose, 20 general plans defining wind development areas and 23 special plans of local governments are underway. For special plans, 1 plan has been initiated in 2019, 5 plans in 2020, 4 plans in 2021, 6 plans in 2022 and 7 plans in 2023.
At the end of 2023, approximately 70 percent of the territory of Estonia had height restrictions set for wind turbines to protect the operational capacity of national defense buildings – radars, because wind turbines interfere with the detection of objects on radars and the operation of radio intelligence. Height restrictions will disappear between 2024 and 2027.
