Turkey registers another 648 MW of unlicensed PV capacity in March

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Turkey’s cumulative registered unlicensed PV capacity has reached 4.59 GW (AC) as of the end of March 2018, according to new statistics published by the country’s state-owned grid operator, TEIAŞ, which appeared on the twitter account of the company’s general manager, Abdullah Atalay.

In March alone, newly registered unlicensed solar power totaled 648 MW. In January and February, meanwhile, new registrations for unlicensed PV projects up to 1 MW reached around 522 MW. Thus, since the beginning of this year, around 1,170 MW of new, unlicensed projects have been registered by TEIAŞ’s official statistics.

As for other new renewable energy sources, wind saw the addition of around 38 MW in March, while for geothermal power, newly registered capacity was 65 MW.

The grid operator's figures have consistently been questioned by several experts in the Turkish solar energy sector, however, as pv magazine has previously reported. Indeed, although TEIAŞ and local solar association, Günder claim these numbers are related to operational solar installations, local experts find that just a portion of this capacity is currently online, while the rest has simply been registered for grid-connection.

Confusion may also have arisen from the overlapping of data between 2016 and 2017, IHS Markit analyst, Susanne von Aichberger recently told pv magazine.

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Regardless of if all the registered capacity will actually be installed or not, TEIAŞ’ figures clearly demonstrate that Turkey is currently one of the most interesting solar markets. According to European solar body, SolarPower Europe, it installed 1.79 GW of new PV capacity in 2017.

Driving this demand, local authorities are granting a FIT of around $0.13/kWh to unlicensed PV projects up to 1 MW, which remains very attractive, despite an increase in the grid-fee for solar projects, which rose from 0.0256 TRL /kWh in 2017, to 0.1025 TRL/kWh (around $0.027) this year.

Added to this, many projects totaling several dozen MWs, and which consist of several 1 MW sub-units, are also seeing strong development in Turkey.

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