How Long is An Bord Pleanála Taking to Decide Energy Planning Applications?

Over the coming years An Bord Pleanála (ABP) will have to process a large volume of planning applications for housing as well as the energy, transport and heating infrastructure necessary to facilitate Ireland reaching its climate targets. Unfortunately, in recent years ABP has been beset by scandals and delays raising questions about whether it is able to deal with the required throughput of applications.

Here I want to examine how long it is taking to decide on energy infrastructure applications. To do this I looked up the application codes for all of the major energy projects which have reached the ABP planning application stage. I then wrote some code to retrieve the information for each of the planning application pages from ABPs website for each relevant energy project. The time taken for planning application consideration to date is shown in the plot below.

I've written a script that should update this image daily so check back to see how long these planning applications take. I will endeavour to add new projects as they get submitted.

So far 0 of the energy projects have had their applications decided on. The projects that have had their application decided are . The decided applications have taken an average of NA days. The planning application that has been in the system the longest without having a decision reached is the Oriel which has taken 243 days so far.

Below is a table of the applications:

ID	Project	Decision	Time Taken
319799	Oriel	Case is due to be decided by 02/12/2024	243
319864	Arklow Bank	Case is due to be decided by 10/12/2024	230
319866	North Irish Sea Array	Case is due to be decided by 12/12/2024	229
320768	Codling Wind Park	Case is due to be decided by 01/04/2025	138

I have a related analysis of how long An Bord Pleanála is taking on major public transport projects here

If you are interested in seeing how this was done the code for this project is available on my GitHub here