Turkey plans to hold new big tenders for wind, solar plants by summer 2018: Minister

ISTANBUL

The work has begun on new tenders for 1,000-megawatt (MW) wind and solar power plants, Turkish Energy Minister Berat Albayrak has said.

Albayrak said the government planned to finalize these tenders by this summer at a sector meeting on Feb. 22.

“We will probably announce the details of the tender this spring … We want to finalize these tenders before this summer ends,” he said during his opening speech at the First Turkish Energy and Mining Forum in Istanbul.

The ministry is working on an offshore wind plant, which will be the world’s largest, the minister said.

“We plan to add a solar battery and storage system to the solar project,” Albayrak added.

The Energy Ministry plans to launch 10,000 MW solar and wind plants in the next decade.

In an effort to reach this goal, the ministry held tenders for 1,000 MW solar and wind plants for each last year.

“In terms of renewable energy, 2017 was a key year for Turkey,” he said.

The Turkish-Korean Kalyon-Hanwha consortium on March 20 last year won the tender bid for the construction of Turkey’s biggest solar power plant set to be built in the Central Anatolian province of Konya’s Karapınar district, with an estimated investment volume of $1.3 billion.

The tender requested locally produced equipment to be used and stipulated that local engineers should constitute 80 percent of employment in the project.

A consortium of German giant Siemens and Turkey’s Türkerler and Kalyon Enerji holdings won a billion-dollar wind energy tender on Aug. 3, 2017, offering the lowest price to the state with $3.48 cents per kilowatt hour.

Eight consortia, including four German giants, participated in the Energy Ministry’s 1,000 MW wind power project tender on July 27, 2017.