Federal sectoral planning: nature and environmental conservation for the expansion of the transmission grid

Based on the practice of federal sectoral planning, the R+D project aims to analyse processes, identify optimisation requirements and potential approaches for standardising the methods, and integrate proposals for specialist methods into federal sectoral planning by 2020.

Methods

Reviewing and presenting existing nature conservation and planning methods for the expansion and new construction of high-voltage electricity lines (underground cables and overhead power lines).

• Presenting the processes and identifying difficulties in connection with federal sectoral planning, established from current practice in ongoing procedures.
• Developing proposals about the point at which to introduce standardisation of the methods required in the course of generating documents for federal sectoral planning.
• Establishing a working aid that describes the agreed methodological standards for planning practice in a form that can be used directly.

The two reports that have now been submitted come at a time of intensive legislative activity to accelerate the expansion of the electricity grid. The implementation of the EU's Renewable Energy Directive (RED III) is expected to lead to the elimination of federal sectoral planning in the future, for which the R&D project was intended to provide methodological input. Some of the methodological proposals contained in the two reports, one on underground cables and one on overhead lines, can also be utilised in the expected determination of infrastructure areas for power line projects. In particular, the proposals for greater automation of the corridor search for power lines and the intensive examination of which data sets are good indicators for which conflicts can be used for this purpose. The ideas and results set out in the two reports are therefore not obsolete, but can also be usefully applied in the new legal environment.