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sponsorship of the Istanbul Chamber of Commerce should be taken with a generous pinch of salt such are the difficulties of pinning down verifiable information in the Middle East’s largest economy, elusive at the best of times.
This being the case, electricity consumption is seen as a more reliable indicator when it comes to getting some idea as regards the real level of industrial activity in the country.
Electricity production was also substantially down in May, declining by 18% y/y to 19.6bn kWh. Some 46% of the production derived from hydropower plants while output from domestic coal took a 15% share and imported coal made a contribution of 17%.
Both natural gas plants and wind plants produced 8% of total electricity output in the month while the remaining 6% was sourced from geothermal, solar, fuel-oil and biomass power producers.
Gas plants hit trouble. Turkey’s natural gas plants, which at 25,654MW had the highest share in the country’s overall electricity production capacity of 91,565MW in April, have hit trouble due to their long-term gas supply contracts and the recent fall in electricity prices.
A price hike for household electricity consumers is expected in the upcoming months, despite the historically low oil prices on global markets. It will stem from currency fluctuation and the structural design of the Turkish electricity market, energy expert and price comparison website encazip.com founder Cagada Kirim told Hurriyet Daily News on May 12.
Under a scheme introduced in 2011, Turkish renewable energy plants such as wind, hydropower, geothermal, biomass and solar installations are provided with feed-in tariffs (YEKDEM). The support for wind and hydropower plants is fixed at $0.073 per kilowatt-hour (kWh), for geothermal facilities at $0.105 kWh and for solar and biomass plants at $0.133 kWh.
Turkish industrialists have complained about the huge jumps seen in the country’s electricity prices.
In April, Cem Asik, head of Turkey’s Electricity Producers Association, anticipated a 17% decline in electricity consumption in May and a 4% contraction in June.
The share of renewable energy sources in Turkey's installed electricity capacity reached 45.2% in 2019 from 44.7% in 2018, state-run news service Anadolu Agency, which compiled data from the energy market regulator, EPDK, has reported.
The country’s installed capacity increased by 2.1% to 84,957 megawatts last year.
Natural gas captured the largest share with 30.5%, followed by hydroelectricity with 24.3%, lignite with 11.9% and imported coal with 10.6%.
Licensed electricity production declined by 0.6% to 294,251 gigawatt-hours last year. Nearly 30.2% of licensed electricity production came from hydraulic plants, while imported coal, natural gas and lignite plants followed with 20.5%, 19.2% and 15.9%, respectively.
Renewable sources' share in licensed electricity production rose from 30.7% in 2018 to 42.1% in 2019.
Turkey's unlicensed installed capacity was up by 18.8% to 6,309 megawatts, with 92.3% of this capacity coming from solar power plants, according to data.
63 TURKEY Country Report July 2020 www.intellinews.com
