With an intensive agenda to enhance the share of renewables in power generation to reduce dependency on imported resources, Turkey announced the country's first offshore wind power farms and its potential locations
Potential regions for Turkey's first offshore wind power farm have been identified as Saros and Gelibolu in Çanakkale and Kıyıköy in the northwestern Marmara province of Tekirdağ. The tender for the first offshore wind farm as part of Renewable Energy Resource Areas (YEKA) will be held this year. According to a statement outlining YEKA's candidate list, which was released by the Energy and Natural Resources Ministry General Directorate of Renewable Energy, new zones were announced to continue the YEKA projects that were successfully tendered last year in solar and wind power plants, each with a capacity of 1,000 megawatts.
Hatay's Erzin district in southern Turkey, Niğde's Bor in Central Anatolia and Şanlıurfa's Viranşehir in the southeast have been identified potential areas to install solar YEKA plants. İN the Energy Ministry's latest YEKA statement.
The potential areas were revealed in accordance with Energy and Natural Resources Ministry's National Energy and Mining Policy devised under the guidance of Minister Berat Albayrak and announced last year in April by the ministry.
The first is Saros gulf off the Aegean cost of Çanakkale and the Gelibolu district in the city, the other region is the Kıyıköy district of Tekirdağ along with the Black Sea borders of the city.
The TurkStream natural gas pipeline project, which will carry Russian gas to Turkey and Europe, also comes to shore in Kıyıköy.
The General Directorate of Renewable Energy launched a comprehensive and detailed work to measure the feasibility of the project in those areas.
After the work has been concluded, the optimum region for the project will be decided and the tender specifications will be drawn up.
In late February, at the Energy and Mining Forum, organized in cooperation with Turkuvaz Media outlets and under the auspices of the Energy and Natural Resources Ministry, Minister Albayrak had announced Turkey's first offshore wind farm project.
The minister also informed that the ministry plans to add the development of battery technology in solar power.
"This year's YEKA contracts will include battery production and storage issues in the specifications," he previously said.
Therefore, for the first time, a giant renewable energy plant will start generation power with its battery facility.
Kalyon Holding Energy Group President Murtaza Ata previously announced that the company plans to add storage facilities to the 1,000 megawatt Karapınar power plant.
Solar and wind YEKA tenders were held in March and August 2017, respectively. While the former was contracted to Turkey's Kalyon and South Korea's Hanwha Q Cells in Karapınar, the latter will be built by German Siemens and Turkish Türkerler and Kalyon. In YEKA's wind tender, the ministry secured a record low feed-in-tariff at $3.48.