Environmental Licensing and Prior Consultation: The Permits Behind a Colombian Solar Project

Executive summary

On August 5, 2026, Colombia's National Environmental Licensing Authority (ANLA) licensed two solar plants of 278.6 MW each in Río de Oro, Cesar. By ANLA's count, that approval brought the solar capacity it licensed under the administration that left office on August 7 to 5.9 GW. XM, the market operator, counted about 2.2 GW of effective solar capacity in July 2026. A license is necessary for a utility-scale plant, and plenty of licensed plants still never reach financial close.

Two things set the pace of permitting in 2026. The first is a faster license for mid-size solar: Decree 1033 of 2025 created the LASolar procedure for plants between 10 and 100 MW, and ANLA issued the first license under it in June 2026. The second is consulta previa, the prior consultation owed to ethnic communities a project may affect. It runs through the Ministry of the Interior, not the environmental authority, and none of the 2025 reforms shortened it.

For an investor, the useful question is narrower than "is the project permitted." Ask which license, issued by whom, for which design, and whether any consultation obligation has been closed or is still open.

Who licenses what

Colombia's environmental licensing rules sit in Decree 1076 of 2015, the environment sector's consolidated regulation. For solar generation, capacity sets the path.

Decree 1076 requires an environmental license for solar generation only from 10 MW up, so a smaller plant does not need one. It still needs the specific permits its site calls for, such as forestry clearance, occupation of a watercourse, or water use, issued by the regional autonomous corporation (CAR) with jurisdiction. Most distributed and commercial rooftop assets, the segment covered in how a Colombian rooftop solar asset gets paid under CREG 174, live here.

From 10 MW to under 50 MW, the license comes from the CAR. From 50 MW up, ANLA has been the licensing authority since Decree 852 of 2024, and the full environmental impact study (EIA) process applies. Decree 1033, issued September 30, 2025, added an optional route for plants between 10 and 100 MW: the LASolar license, issued by ANLA under an optimized procedure. The Ministry of Environment says it cuts processing time by up to 70%.

On the standard route, ANLA has 90 business days to decide on a license for a new project, and in 2024 it said it had answered every licensing request on time. The clock does not include the time a developer spends producing the study or answering information requests, and that time is usually longer.

What LASolar changes

LASolar is narrower than its headline number. To qualify, a project must sit on land in coverage categories 1, 2, or 3, stay out of marine and coastal areas, avoid water-source protection zones and watercourse buffers (unless it holds the corresponding permits), and sit at least 500 meters from another operating solar plant, according to Pérez-Llorca's summary of the decree. Projects that qualify get three concrete benefits under the decree:

• Connection assets can be licensed in the same application, without a separate Alternative Environmental Assessment.
• Plants inside type C forest reserve zones that need no new roads skip the forest reserve removal step.
• ANLA works to fixed deadlines: 15 days to issue project-specific terms of reference, which stay valid for a year, and 15 days to rule on the license, counted from the start order or from the developer's answer to any information request.

The first LASolar license went to Parque Solar DSE Neiva, a 19.9 MW plant with a 34.5 kV connection line in Neiva, Huila. ANLA opened the evaluation on March 30, 2026, and granted the license on June 18, 2026, 80 calendar days later. ANLA says 30 business days of that were its own evaluation and the rest went to the developer's answers to information requests. By then ANLA had received 33 LASolar requests and found 13 of them viable.

Eighty days is fast by Colombian standards, and a single data point. The inclusion criteria screen out sites with difficult water, coastal, or forest profiles, so the projects that use LASolar are the ones least likely to have needed a long process anyway. A diligence team should read LASolar as a fast lane for clean sites. It says little about licensing risk for the rest of the pipeline.

Consulta previa runs on its own clock

Prior consultation is a fundamental right of Colombia's indigenous, Afro-Colombian, raizal, and Rrom communities, grounded in the Constitution and in ILO Convention 169, which Colombia's Congress approved through Law 21 of 1991. When a project may directly affect a community, the state has to consult it before authorizing the project.

The process starts with a determination from the Ministry of the Interior's national prior consultation authority (DANCP) on whether consultation applies to the project's area of influence. If it does, the consultation has to run and close before the environmental authority can decide the license. ANLA can suspend its own evaluation while it waits, and it has done so.

The numbers show the scale. In the 2026 reform debate, Senator Juan Espinal cited more than 13,000 consultation processes between 2011 and 2026, about 1,350 of them in 2026, as reported by El Colombiano. Over the last four years only 16% reached an agreement protocol. Of the processes still active, 31% have been stalled for four years or more.

The Colectora transmission line is the example every developer in the Caribbean region knows. It was awarded in 2018 to Enlaza, part of Grupo Energía Bogotá, to carry 1,050 MW of wind and solar out of La Guajira over 475 km. The consultation count started at an estimated 50, rose to 235, and passed 250 after the Ministry of the Interior identified more communities in 2026. That works out to about one consultation for every 1.9 km of line. The line was due in service before August 2026. In September, Portafolio reported 18 additional communities certified during the year and full operation pushed back to April 2027.

Colectora matters for solar investors even though it is a transmission project. A plant can hold both a license and a connection assignment and still wait on someone else's consultation to deliver power. The grid side of that dependency is in Colombia's grid connection queue.

Consultation risk has also cost the country projects. In 2023 Enel suspended the Windpeshi wind farm in La Guajira. EDP Renewables later walked away from its Alpha and Beta wind projects in the same department even though ANLA had licensed them. Those are wind projects, and La Guajira has the country's densest indigenous territory, but the lesson carries over: an environmental license did not settle the community question.

The license covers one design

Investors often skip one detail: a Colombian environmental license authorizes a specific project design, including its footprint, access roads, and water crossings. The Cesar license, for example, authorizes about 67 km of access roads, 14 watercourse crossings, and forestry clearance over 598 hectares. Build something materially different and the license has to be modified, and a modification can reopen consultation.

This already happens. In June 2025 ANLA reported that a modification of the Camelias project's license in La Guajira was suspended pending prior consultation. ANLA approved the modification in October 2025, after consultations with 15 Wayuu communities were formalized. Common triggers for a modification include:

• Adding battery storage. The first long-term auction awarded 100 MW of storage alongside 995 MW of solar, covered in how Colombian solar sells power.
• Moving the connection line or substation after a new UPME assignment.
• Expanding capacity on the same site.

When a sponsor presents a licensed project and a financial model built on a revised design, the two documents have to match. If they don't, the model is pricing a project that has no license yet.

What to diligence

1. Ask for the license resolution itself, not a summary of it. Confirm the issuing authority (CAR or ANLA), the procedure (standard or LASolar), the resolution number and date, and whether the resolution is final or still open to appeal.
2. Compare the licensed design to the design in the model. Capacity, footprint, connection route, and any storage should match the resolution. Any difference points to a modification the sponsor still has to obtain.
3. Ask for the DANCP determination. Either the Ministry of the Interior found that consultation does not apply to the area of influence, or it found that it does. In the second case, ask for the closing protocol, and confirm it covers every community the ministry identified. Colectora's count kept growing after the process started.
4. Read the agreement commitments as operating costs. Consultation agreements usually include payments, local hiring, or infrastructure the project owes over its life. They belong in the operating budget, and they bind whoever owns the plant.
5. Check whether the license can be assigned. An acquisition or a change of project company requires assigning the license (cesión) before the environmental authority. Confirm the path before closing, not after.
6. Map the dependencies outside the project. List the transmission works, substations, and access roads the plant depends on that someone else is building, and check the permitting and consultation status of each.

Several of these items connect to the broader risk list in what drives Colombian solar returns. Permitting slippage moves the commercial operation date. A later commercial operation date moves when the Law 1715 tax benefits apply and when contract delivery obligations start.

What to watch

For the rest of 2026 I am watching three things. First, how many of the 13 viable LASolar requests receive licenses, and how long they take. One 80-day license is a data point, and a cohort would be a track record. Second, the consulta previa reform. The government that took office in August has proposed running licensing and consultation in parallel, so that a pending consultation no longer suspends the environmental review. A Centro Democrático bill in Congress proposes a central consultation registry (SICOP) and a six-month deadline for characterizing communities. Fedesarrollo has recommended that the state complete consultations before it tenders strategic projects and keep a single registry of communities. Each proposal would shift the risk to a different party. Third, how the administration that took office on August 7 treats ANLA's licensing pace, since the 5.9 GW figure belongs to its predecessor.

The permits do not change the resource. Irradiation in the Caribbean region averages 5.5 kWh/m2/day. What they change is how long it takes a site with that resource to become a plant that delivers power, and whether the documents in a data room describe the plant that will actually be built.