Turkish company InoSolar Led Aydınlatma and Sonar Enerji Sistemleri is getting ready for a factory investment to produce the German SolarWorld's solar panels as its distributor in Turkey in the coming period, according to a report in the Turkish Dünya newspaper.
InoSolar Chairman İsmet Ersoy and SolarWorld CEO Frank Asbeck signed a confidentiality agreement for to maintain and deepen the cooperation between the two companies in the long term in Freiberg, Germany.
"The agreement also includes panel production in Turkey with SolarWorld technology. We intend to establish a 100-megawatt [MW] panel facility in Turkey. We determined an organized industrial zone in central Anatolia as the factory location," Inosolar Chairman Ersoy said.
SolarWorld CEO Asbeck said that they have been cooperating with InoSolar since 2012, highlighting that they are signing a confidentiality agreement covering 60 MW in sales in the first half of 2018. "We want to increase panel sales to Turkey to 100 MW in the short term. Perhaps after the sales of the first and second set of 100 MW you may think why don't you produce these products in Turkey. We also lean toward this idea," Asbeck added.
Asbeck said the plant to be established in Turkey in the SolarWorld-InoSolar partnership will have similar characteristics to the factory in Germany, noting that the locality rate in the product to be produced in this plant may be around 60-65 percent, including the workforce and that it can even rise to 100 percent in the future.
Asbeck said products such as glass, aluminum and frames are still supplied from Turkey for panel production. "We do not see a problem in the provision of basic materials from Turkey. When I came to Turkey 10 years ago, there were serious projects in solar and wind energy," Asbeck added.
SolarWorld, which recently suffered financial bottlenecks, went into bankruptcy last year. However, Ersoy explained that the company's production facilities in Germany were saved from bankruptcy after Qatari shareholders raised their shares from 29 percent to 49 percent. "They produce in raw material facilities worth 1 billion euros in Qatar. When they complete their negotiations with the Qataris, we will be able to bring technologies that do not exist in Turkey in terms of both quality and technology," Ersoy said.
Ersoy said that they made an 80-kilowatt-hour (kW) installation in a greenhouse in Çankaya Mansion in 2012 under the partnership agreement between InoSolar and German Wagner Solar. Ersoy also recalled that they are one of the investors in one of Turkey's largest solar power plants in Gaziantep on a single field with a capacity of 25 MW.