Share of natural gas in Turkey’s power generation declines

ANKARA - Anadolu Agency

The share of natural gas in Turkey’s power generation decreased to 32.6 percent in the first quarter of the year, the lowest total in recent years, according to official data. While coal-fired power plants took the lion’s share in power generation in the mentioned period, the share of hydro power continued to rise.

According to data compiled from the Energy Ministry by Anadolu Agency, some 21.4 billion kWh of electricity was generated by using natural gas resources in the first quarter of the year in Turkey, where around 70 billion kWh of power was generated in total. 

In the first quarter of the year, around 20.4 billion kWh of power was generated from local coal reserves, a 2 percent increase from the same period of 2015, and some 10.2 billion kWh of power was generated from imported coal reserves, a 1 percent year-on-year decrease. Over 30.5 billion kWh of power was generated from coal reserves in this vein. 

The share of hydro power plants reached 26.4 percent in total production with around 17.4 billion kWh of electricity. 

The share of wind farms declined to 3.6 billion kWh with a 1.1 percent year-on-year decrease, according to the data. 

Turkey reached a total of 74,039 megawatts (MW) of installed power capacity as of the end of March. 

Hydro power plants take the lion’s share in installed power capacity with 35.4 percent, followed by gas-fired plants with 28.6 percent and coal-fired plants with 21.5 percent. Some 6.2 percent was owned by wind farms and 8.3 percent by multi-fuel plants.