Turkey’s 1 GW PV tender more than eight times oversubscribed

Turkey's Ministry of Energy has published the list of the pre-qualified bidders of the 1 GW PV tender it launched on March 8.

The tender was more than eight times oversubscribed as 131 project proposals with a combined capacity of 9,440 MW were submitted for review.

“This was a record level of applications,” Eren Engur, a board member of the energy storage committee at the Turkish PV association Günder, told pv magazine. The trade body represents the Turkish Republic in the programs of IEA PVPS (International Energy Agency Photovoltaic Power Systems) and includes public and private companies and the Ministry of Energy itself.

The application documents are currently being reviewed and those developers that will be selected in the pre-qualification process will be invited to the bidding final phase soon, according to Engur.

Through the tender, the Turkish authorities want to build PV projects ranging in size from 10 to 20 MW. The projects will be located in 36 cities. The cities of Van, Antalya, Gaziantep, and Mardi will each see 50 MW of allocated capacity, while Ankara and Diyarbakır will be assigned 40 MW each. For Usak, Erzurum, Burdur, Mersin, Osmaniye, Yozgat, Batman, Agri, Aksaray and Adiyaman, the respective allocated capacity is 30 MW each. Other cities will see the remaining portion of the installed solar power.

In a document published in January in the country's official journal, the Turkish government specified that it set a ceiling price of TRY0.35/kWh ($0.047) for the procurement exercise and that winners will receive a 15-year power purchase guarantee. Domestic content requirements for equipment selection will play an important role in the tender.