The Turkish government has revealed plans to open a tender for utility scale solar projects under the country’s Renewable Energy Resources Area Project (YEKA) scheme on December 19.
According to information provided to pv magazine by Eren Engur, the CEO and founder of Turkish consultancy Icarus Energy, the YEKA tender will be held on April 20, 2020.
Engur also revealed that Abdullah Tancan – Turkey’s deputy minister of ministry of energy and natural resources – said in a meeting last week that the authorities would award 1 GW of PV capacity across 39 provinces, consisting of 100 projects of 10 MW each.
“Unlike the previous 1 GW winner-takes-all YEKA-1 tender, this ‘small-medium scale investment opportunity’ will attract many local and international investors just as the scheme for unlicensed PV projects up to 1 MW, which resulted in 5.5 GW of grid-connected capacity,” Engur said.
He has also explained that the tender might include some local content requirements for PV modules, as well as the option to add storage, as with the YEKA-2 tender that was scrapped by the Turkish government shortly after it was announced at the beginning of last year. “We will have the final meeting before the official announcement this Wednesday in Ankara,” added Engur.
The scrapped tender included local content rules that required 60% of the modules in a project to come from domestic manufacturers. It was designed to assign three big projects with capacities of 200 MW, 300 MW and 500 MW.
The winner-takes-all YEKA-1 tender held in March 2017 was linked to the construction of a vertically integrated solar module factory. South Korea’s Hanwha Q Cells and Turkish company Kalyon Enerji won all of the 1 GW of capacity that was offered. After Hanwha abandoned the project last year, Kalyon Enerji found a new partner, China Electronics Technology Group Corporation (CETC). The factory will be built near Ankara and is expected to begin operations in April.
The Solar Energy Roadmap, released by the Turkish PV association in October, predicted that Turkey could install 38 GW of solar by 2030. Another report published by the Shura Energy Transition Center in May 2018 predicted that solar could pass 20 GW by 2026.
