Portugal, along with other European countries, is under pressure to accelerate the transition to renewable energy. Climate goals have short deadlines and the decarbonization of the economy requires decisions made yesterday. The Renewable Energy Acceleration Zones Sector Program (PSZAER), which entered public consultation this weekwas born precisely from this urgency. However, when drawing a “green map” in which about 7% of the continental territory can “accelerate” renewables without environmental assessment, the program appears to have ignored an essential actor: municipalities.
When the National Association of Portuguese Municipalities (ANMP) and local authorities were called to comment, they were faced with a deadline of just 20 days to analyze the document. To make the situation worse, the geographic files essential for municipalities to assess the implications in their municipalities arrived late, making rigorous analysis difficult. This process has an implicit centralized logic that removes the decision from the territory, as if the planning was resolved by the mere exclusion of polygons on a map. The answer was clear: so, no.
There is another contradiction in the process: the European Renewable Energy Directive (RED III) determines that the acceleration of renewables must give priority to areas that are already artificial and degraded, such as rooftops, industrial areas, parking lots or abandoned mines, in order to protect biodiversity and agricultural soils. But the “green map”, at least for now, tells a different story: of the more than 663 thousand hectares mapped, less than 2% correspond to artificialized surfaces, with the bulk being fall on forest and agricultural soil. European discourse talks about rooftops and industrial zones, but national practice paves the way for the occupation of the rural landscape and the industrialization of the interior.
The Government is now asking local authorities to look “with good will at the maps”, so that the exercise is not “in vain”. Municipalities seem to resist, remembering that spatial planning cannot be subordinated to national energy policy, bypassing local autonomy and Municipal Master Plans (PDM). Municipalities such as Santa Maria da Feira have already given the warning: the spots drawn on the map violate its PDM and compromise local sporting, environmental and cultural development strategies.
And there is yet another problem that the program does not clarify: in the name of simplification, projects located in the ZAER are exempt from the traditional Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) procedure. Thus, by evaluating each project in isolation, the State loses the ability to measuring cumulative impacts on each territory, as noted by the Portuguese Environment Agency in its opinion. Instead of measuring the “carrying capacity” of a region, licenses are granted park by park, panel by panel, high voltage line by high voltage line — until certain areas of the interior become authentic green “sacrifice zones”, saturated with infrastructure.
Low-density territories become energy production platforms for the benefit of the coast and large urban centers. Without mandatory compensation for local communities, the result is an extraction: the wealth generated in the interior reverts to the needs and profits of agents external to the territory.
As summarized by ANMP in its opinionthe energy transition must be built with the territories and not against them. A program that ignores those who live, invest and manage these territories does not accelerate anything — it prepares administrative blockages and social protest. For this transition to work, it must be built with the municipalities, not over them.
