Supreme Court confirms processing of Campelo Wind Farm by Xunta de Galicia6 May 2025

Watson Farley & Williams (“WFW”), together with CCS Abogados, represented Greenalia Group in its appeals against judgments issued against it by the High Court of Justice of Galicia (“TSJG”) annulling a prior agreement of 18 November 2021 of the Council of the Xunta de Galicia regarding the Campelo wind farm project and related facilities in the Coristanco and Santa Comba municipalities. Said agreement granted both prior administrative authorisation and administrative authorisation for construction, as well as declaring the project of public utility. The Supreme Court (“SC”), however, recently issued Judgments no. 316/2025 and 317/2025 dated 21 March, in which it upheld the aforementioned appeals, annulled the contested judgments as not in accordance with the law, and confirmed the full legality of the aforementioned agreement of the Xunta.

By virtue of Judgments no. 316/2025 and 317/2025, the Supreme Court has established precedent on the following issues:

• When determining whether the installation of wind farms sharing connection facilities should be considered a single project for environmental assessment purposes, the court clarifies and states that “it is common in practice to request and grant authorizations for wind farms located in close proximity to each other and that also share certain elements or infrastructures, as this can be beneficial both from the economic perspective of the developers and the objective of limiting the environmental impact that accompanies, by definition, wind farm installations“. In fact, “the regulations have been promoting the sharing of infrastructures to limit the environmental impact of this type of installation” and “we can affirm that the use of common infrastructures is a technical requirement imposed or favoured by the applicable regulations, and that not always when two or more wind turbine-based electricity productions installations share certain infrastructures or elements, can a breach of the unitary nature inherent to each wind farm be observed“.
• Therefore, the High Court concludes that “The fact that two or more wind farm installations share connection facilities does not necessarily mean that we must consider the existence of a single wind farm project for the purposes of its environmental assessment” and that “The determination of whether, in such a case, the existence of a single wind farm should be considered for the purposes of its proper environmental assessment must be made on a case-by-case basis, taking into account the relevant circumstances, in the light of the applicable regulations and jurisprudence“.
• Applying this doctrine to the case of Campelo, it concluded that “the appealed judgment does not conform to the doctrine we have just mentioned, as it derives the unity of the project for the purposes of its environmental assessment solely and exclusively, from the fact that the three concerned wind farms (Campelo, Bustelo and Monte Toural) share “structures and connections” or “evacuation lines and infrastructures”, without referring to or considering any other concurrent circumstance or the impact of such separation on the adequacy of the environmental assessment produced under the circumstances of the case which, as recorded in the proceedings, was of an ordinary nature, with the corresponding study of cumulative and synergistic effects whose sufficiency or insufficiency is not analysed“.