Tekirdağ Province, in northwestern Turkey, will be the site of several new wind power plants over the next few years.
This has been a big year for wind power in Turkey, with more than 5,000 MW of wind power projects (WPPs) licensed and awaiting permitting. Foreign companies such as Nordex and GE are jumping into the expanding sector with investment and equipment.
Now, Germany’s third-largest renewable energy firm, EnBW, has launched a new WPP in partnership with Turkey’s Borusan Holding: a 50 MW wind farm in Tekirdağ.
Tekirdağ’s second wind farm
Currently, Tekirdağ has just one wind farm: a 28.8 MW facility built in 2009.
The new EnBW project, known as “Balabanlı”, will produce 50 MW from 22 Siemens turbines. Siemens will also provide maintenance services for a period of ten years. The total electrical capacity of the WPP will be enough to meet the electricity needs of about 43,000 households.
Balabanlı is the second WPP in Turkey completed by the EnBW-Borusan Holding partnership. The first, finished in 2009 and expanded in 2010, was the 60 MW Bandırma WPP in Balıkesir.
After winning carbon offset certificates and passing an environmental impact assessment, Borusan-EnBW held a public information meeting about the plant on September 12. Now that construction can begin, the plant is expected to be operational next year.
More investment blowing in the wind
EnBW declared earlier this year that it plans to build 5 GW of new wind energy capacity over the next two decades, much of it in Turkey and in partnership with Borusan.
With Turkey’s current wind energy capacity at just 1,800 MW, these plans could make EnBW one of the biggest foreign firms in Turkey’s wind power industry. Other foreign renewable energy companies have also noticed the appeal of the Turkish wind power industry, however.
At 83,000 MW, Turkey has the largest wind power potential of the European OECD countries, according to a study released last year. But bureaucratic complication and lackluster government support have held the industry back from fully developing Turkey’s resource. A poorly planned 2007 WPP license auction held up the sector for several years by auctioning off tenders for overlapping parcels of land and requiring no expertise or bidding criteria from bidders.
Turkey’s energy market regulatory authority sorted out some of those tenders earlier this year, allowing several new WPPs to proceed. Hopefully, that new activity and the burgeoning foreign interest in Turkey’s wind potential will feed off each other, developing this resource to its full extent.
Read more about wind power in Turkey:
Turkey Ripe For Renewable Energy Boom – So Why The Delay?
14,000 Turkish Homes To Be Powered By World’s Most Efficient 1.5-MW Wind Turbines
Tektuğ Elektrik Group Enters Turkey’s Expanding Wind Energy Sector
Image via lar-f
Author: Julia Harte
Julia spent her childhood summers in a remote research station in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, helping her father with a 25-year-old experiment in which he simulated global warming over a patch of alpine meadow. When not measuring plant species diversity or carbon flux in the soil, she could be found scampering around the forests and finding snowbanks to slide down. Now she is a freelance journalist living in Istanbul, where her passion for the environment intersects with her interest in Turkish politics and grassroots culture. She also writes about Turkish climate and energy policy for Solve Climate News.
