Turkey’s PV tender concludes with lowest price of $0.021/kWh and 1 GW of allocated capacity

Turkey's Minister of Energy has finalized this week the 1 GW YEKA 3 PV tender launched in March and held during the past five weeks.

The Turkish authorities allocated all the capacity they planned to assign through the tender and selected projects with a size ranging from 10 to 20 MW.

The lowest price in the procurement exercise was TRY 0.182 ($0.021)/kWh and the highest TRY 32.0 ($0.037)/kWh. “Thanks to local and international investors' huge interest we’ve witnessed a fierce competition,” Eren Engur, a board member of Turkish solar association Günder and president of its Energy Storage Committee, told pv magazine.

The selected projects will have to be built with 70% of solar modules manufactured in Turkey. “There are more than 40 local PV module manufacturers in Turkey and some of them have been doing OEM for global Top 10 and Tier-1 suppliers for many years already,” Eren explained. “And there are already some Tier-1 brands manufacturing in Turkey and we see serious intention from other players to place local manufacturing in the country to benefit from a market that can reach 1.5 GW per year.”

The solar plants will be located in 36 cities and across 74 grid connection points. The following cities have been allocated projects under the tender: Adıyaman, Ağrı, Aksaray, Ankara, Antalya, Batman, Bayburt, Bilecik, Bingöl, Bitlis, Burdur, Bursa, Çankırı, Çorum, Diyarbakır, Elazığ, Erzurum, Eskişehir, Gaziantep, Hakkari, Iğdır, Kahramanmaraş, Kars, Kırşehir, Kilis, Malatya, Mardin, Mersin, Muş, Nevşehir, Osmaniye, Siirt, Şırnak, Uşak, Van and Yozgat.

“We’re so delighted with the outcome of this tender, along with the recently announced regulations for energy storage ,” Engur stated. Another 1 GW tender — the YEKA-4 — will be announced within two months and may include the planned allocation of around 300 MWh of storage, he added.

Turkey reached 7,065.4 MW of installed PV capacity at the end of April. The Solar Energy Roadmap report published by Günder in 2019 predicted the nation could install 38 GW of solar by 2030. A separate study, published by the Istanbul-based Shura Energy Transition Center, in May 2018, had predicted solar could pass 20 GW by 2026.