Turkey - Cesme looks to wind energy for electricity

Turkey’s interest in domestic renewable energy sources is gradually increasing in an effort to reduce dependency on foreign sources for energy production. A power plant that uses wind energy to produce electricity was established in Cesme on Turkey’s Aegean coast by Polat Holding and Demirer Energy. The project is a $450 million euros partnership with German Enercon. The Mare Monastery Plant, which is the first leg of the Wind Energy Plants project, will begin operations in January 2007. The wind energy plant will produce energy at around 140 million kilowatt per hour with 49 turbines. Three turbines already established by the Demirer Group in the same region in 1998 meet the energy needs of the province during winter nights.

Almost 45 percent of the overall energy produced in Turkey uses natural gas purchased from Russia and Iran at a very high cost. Additionally, since contractors receive loans at very high interest rates while constructing power plants, the unit price of electricity produced in these plants has reached 11 cents. However, the unit price of electricity trades between 0,5 and 2,5 cents when produced from either water or coal. Despite the expense of building wind energy plants, the unit price of electricity produced is around six cents for the first five or six years. This figure may fall to three cents later on. With this in mind, the establishment of wind energy plants has been widely encouraged by the energy administration in recent years in Turkey.