• $80bn to boost output
• $30bn for infrastructure
• Speed-up for approval

Turkey is planning to quadruple its renewable energy capacity over the coming decade, with investments of $80 billion to boost output and another $30 billion to improve transmission and infrastructure.

A new streamlined tendering and approval process was also part of the updated renewables policy announced by Turkey’s energy and natural resources minister, Alparslan Bayraktar, on October 20.

Bayraktar said projects would now go from initial offers to breaking ground in less than two years, half the present norm. 

“We believe that by working together with stakeholders, financial institutions and investors, we can achieve our goal of investing $80 billion in renewable energy,” Bayraktar told key industry figures in Istanbul.

Under the new programme, Turkey will expand its present renewable generation capacity of 30,000 megawatts fourfold to 120,000MW by 2035, bringing an additional 7,500MW to 8,000MW online every year. 

The policy is intended to reduce Turkey’s reliance on energy imports, reinforce energy security and achieve Ankara’s goal of net zero emissions by 2053, the minister said. 

One of those at the briefing, Kemal Ertuğran, general manager of Sirius Renewable Energy Tech, said technically the targets laid out by the minister were realistic, as long as measures such as improving infrastructure and streamlining bureaucratic processes were met. 

“However, the financial side of the issue may change the situation somewhat, because currently a large number of our investors prefer financial markets, especially those whose business is not energy investment,” he told AGBI. 

Ertuğran said the most positive outcome of the meeting was the minister setting out a roadmap not for one or two years, but for a decade and more, building expectations of greater willingness by investors to buy into the sector. 

Kicking the carbon habit

Turkey will also need to use that decade to kick its carbon habit, with the country now outstripping Germany and Poland as Europe’s leading producer of coal-fired electricity.

Coal power stations account for 37 percent of the country’s generated electricity, the largest single component in Turkey’s energy mix, according to a report released in mid-October by the research think tank Ember. 

With Turkey having to buy 40 percent of the coal it needs from overseas to feed its power stations, a switch to renewables would reduce its import bill as well as emissions.

While much of Turkey’s renewable energy output is focused on wind, hydro and solar power, it is also planning to add nuclear energy to the mix.

The first of four reactors, with a combined capacity of 4,800MW, at the Akkuyu power station in southern Turkey is due to come online next year, with Ankara planning to have at least two more nuclear power plants built, of similar or larger capacity, in the coming decades.