The country’s cumulative installed PV capacity has now surpassed 1.5 GW, while another 500 MW is expected to be installed by the end of 2017.
Turkey had reached 1,503 MW of installed PV capacity as of the end of June 2017, according to statistics released by the Turkish solar association Günder, which are based on the country’s Energy Market Regulatory Board’s monthly Electrical Statistics Report.
According to these figures, in the first six months of the year the newly installed PV power was around 553.2 MW. For comparison, full year 2016 new additions total 656.6 MW. This means that this year’s PV development will likely be the best ever recorded in the country. Furthermore, Günder said it expects that Turkey’s installed PV capacity may cross the 2 GW threshold by the end of this year, thus enabling deployment of more than 1 GW of solar power.
If the current trend is confirmed, Turkey may become Europe’s third largest PV market in 2017, after Germany and the UK, which are both expected to surpass 2 GW of new solar capacity.
Of the cumulative installed capacity, 1,491.7 MW is represented by unlicensed PV plants. Under the Turkish legislation, all solar PV projects under 1 MW in size do not need to obtain a license from the Turkish government. These means that all the plants included in this category are below 1 MW or are segmented into 1 MW sub-units. The remaining 12.9 MW is represented by licensed PV capacity.
The country has set a target of 5 GW of solar PV capacity by 2023. Turkey’s energy minister said in March that an auction for 1 GW of new solar PV plants will also take place by the end of the summer, but plans have not been announced yet. In March, South Korea’s Hanwha Q Cells and local Turkish firm Kalyon Enerji a won a 1 GW solar tender, offering to sell the generated electricity at a feed-in tariff of $0.0699 per kWh.